Seeking its spirit from Guy Ritchie's cult classic Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), morerecently employed in Bollywood films like 99 and Sankat City,Delhi Belly polishes the crime-comedy genre by a few notches despite its unrefined ambience.
Three friends who share a dingy Delhi room land into trouble when a parcel of smuggled diamonds is erroneously exchanged with a stool sample. Tashi (Imran Khan), who is newly-engaged to Sonia (Shenaz Treasuryvala), rams in his car, the first gift from the in-laws, after getting into a brawl for another girl Meneka (Poorna Jagannathan). Arup (Vir Das) has just been ditched by his girlfriend for an NRI. The fatso foodie Nitin (Kunal Roy Kapoor) who is on a perpetual pooping exercise is the one responsible for all the shit that follows when an underworld don (Vijay Raaz) is behind the trio for his diamonds.
While the multiple monetary rotations in Lock Stock... (and its Indian offshoots) have been intricate, Delhi Belly doesn't complicate the tradeoffs to that extent, yet doesn't dilute on the essence of the original. Delhi Belly has a soul of its own with its unique characters and side-characters and imaginative situations. Writer Akshat Varma gets the grammar of the genre correct, evoking humour out of the most unusual situations – be it grim, gross or serious, making way for a perfect dark comedy. The language used blends with the setting and the dialogues range from the hilarious to laugh-out-loud moments. The humour is absolutely situational and, though there is a lot of mayhem, there is no space for slapstick.
Director Abhinay Deo is in as much sync with the script, never making you lose the narrative for a
moment. The pacing is quick, the milieu is authentic, the dialect is unadulterated and the characters real. The track between Tashi and Meneka is never treated as a romance track per se. Yet when they indulge in a spontaneous smooch in the pre-climax, their chemistry doesn't seem abrupt. The final shootout in stylized slow motion shots works as a tribute to Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Be it the burka-clad diamond tradeoff in a jewelry shop or a ceiling-collapsing sequence which literally brings the house down, almost every scene results into hilarity.
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