De Dana Dan

A comedy that seems more like a tourism ad for Singapore. Is director Priyadarshan losing his talent?

Priyadarshan, like all of us, uses the traditional five senses for his professional expertise. He is losing one of them rapidly—the touch for comedy. His De Dana Dan is a jigsaw puzzle, not a movie. The cerebral pathways you have to activate for the film to make any sense are so numerous, you need dopamine, not popcorn.

The first twenty minutes are clear enough. The location is Singapore. A rich bitch, her dog and her man-servant live in this squeaky clean metropolis. The bitch (Archana Puran Singh) loves the dog (Moolchandji) but hates the man (Akshay Kumar). The man loves a woman (Katrina Kaif) but hates her dad (Tinu Anand).

The problem is money. Akshay is a servant in the hag’s villa because he is repaying his late father’s loan. One day, in consort with his friend and fellow pauper (Suniel Shetty), he gets the bright idea of kidnapping Moolchandji and asking the bitch for ransom. But Moolchandji has not been granted the honorific ‘ji’ for nothing. He is much smarter than Mr Dumb and Mr Dumber and escapes. The Singapore Police, just marginally smarter, conclude that it is Akshay who has been kidnapped.

So far so good. But from here on, the film goes haywire. Priyadarshan brings in half a dozen sub-plots and holes up everyone in a 5-star hotel that he has rented fully. All the usual suspects have been rounded up—Rajpal Yadav as a waiter, Johnny Lever as a supari killer, Paresh Rawal as a shady businessman. There are idiotic mistaken identities galore.

Fortunately, for most of the second half of the film, Akshay is locked up in a closet. The rest of film is not so merciful. The circular architecture of the hotel, the two dozen rooms in which the action alternates, the loud, rapid and abusive conversations trigger vertigo. The tourist industry of this excellent city-state is not going to get a boost when your instant recall of De Dana Dan is a dreadful comedy set in ‘Singabloodypore’.

comedyPriyadarshan