With Cirkus, a shrill Rohit Shetty and a dull Ranveer Singh deliver 2022’s worst

Not all bad movies are equal. There are different brands and brackets of badness. Terrible is a spectrum. There are those that leave you angry and frustrated at the sheer wasted time, misguided energy and wasted talent that went into making the thing. Not to mention the hours and life it took from you that you’re never getting back. There are those that leave you exhausted and defeated, as if you’re life is now lesser somehow for having seen it. Or then, my personal favourite, those that plunge you into a violent existential crisis as you wonder whether it isn’t the movie but you that’s the problem. And then there are movies like Cirkus. A distinct kind of awful that left me baffled, dejected, and confused, all at once. I’m truly and sincerely curious to know what it is Rohit Shetty, and more importantly, Ranveer Singh were going for with this one. Also read: Cirkus box office day 1 collection: Rohit Shetty’s comedy film opens at around ₹7.5 crore amid negative reviews

The latest on-screen take on Shakespeare’s The Comedy Of Errors (famously adapted into Gulzar’s 1982 comedy Angoor), Cirkus stars Ranveer Singh and Varun Sharma, both in double roles, both playing a pair of twins (who share the same name). Both sets of twins were separated at birth and now, 30 years later, through a series of “kookie happenstances,” all their lives intersect to offer many chaotic episodes of mistaken identity. If it sounds like the plot belongs to a bygone era, that’s quite intentional. Rohit Shetty’s movie has nostalgia baked into its DNA. It tries to take us back to the David Dhawan-esque madcap movies of decades gone by. The kind that featured inconsequential subplots and animated supporting characters who add little to the proceedings aside from random entertainment. In Cirkus we get gangsters and robbers given names like Momo, Mango, and Chikki.

As another Rohit Shetty slapstick comedy, much of Cirkus is what you’d expect. It’s shrill, assault-on-the-senses storytelling with a lot of loud to go around – the loud tonality, loud visuals, loud sound, loud performances, and so on. These are characters who are more cartoons than people. Throw in the lack of a coherent plot and unapologetically silly, slapstick gags built on squeaky sound effects (much of this film involves one of the two Ranveer Singhs getting episodically shocked by an electric current Housefull 2 style). Of all the gaudy packaging, the furiously unhinged use of colour was one of the only things that worked well. At least this crazy crayon world felt visually distinctive.

And all of these elements are perfectly fine and to be expected from the grand Rohit Shetty experience. But the hope is that they’re used in service of the film achieving what it’s going for – to have us laugh and be thoroughly entertained. But Cirkus is spectacularly unfunny. The little laughter that it did muster was, for me, broadly one of three kinds. First, there’s the rare frenetic, ridiculous gag that does land (still, you’re never entirely sure if you’re laughing at the film or with it). Second, there’s a scene-stealing Sanjay Mishra as the kookie, bombastic father of one of the two Ranveers’ girlfriends. He’s the only buffoonish character in a film full of them that elicits some sort of comedic response from us. The third is the laughter of defeat. The sound of utter “how-did-I-get-here-and-what-is-even-happening” resignation. The kind of laughter where you’re only ever a single moment away from breaking down entirely.

There’s a skillset to silly. A method to manufacturing mindless and crafting comedic chaos which is nowhere to be found in Cirkus. Danish Sait-starrer Humble Politician Nograj, for example – a slapstick gags galore satire set in the world of politics – understands this. It’s a show that wears its wackiness on its sleeve, offering unabashedly silly self-aware comedy. Alternatively, there are those berserk comedies, like Bhuvan Bam’s smash hit YouTube series Dhindora, where, even if the jokes don’t always land, you can still feel the sincere intent of a group of storytellers just wanting to make us laugh. Cirkus, on the other hand, is too random, empty, and pointless to have us feel even an iota of any such sincerity. It isn’t crafted comedic chaos as much as it is random buffoonery. (I have a theory that the reason the volume of the film is so loud is to block out the sound of being able to hear the audience’s laughter….or lack thereof).

And then there’s the mysterious case of Ranveer Singh. Not only has he never been less enjoyable to watch, this film sees Ranveer at his dullest (which I didn’t even know was a possibility). The born entertainer and talented actor is dead behind the eyes here, sleepwalking through the movie in a way I never thought he could. For someone who’s known to make each of his characters so distinctive, in this double-role act, the only way we can differentiate between each Ranveer twin is the length of his sleeves. The crutch of costumes does not a character make.

For me, Ranveer is the actor responsible for making the Rohit Shetty brand of cinema exciting again. With Simmba, Ranveer made the director’s brand of excess, engaging and even enjoyable. The first half of Simmba (before it gets all murder-is-good problematic) is one of the finest Hindi masala movies of the last decade. It’s also why Ranveer single-handedly salvaged Sooryavanshi with that movie-stealing climax cameo alongside Ajay Devgn’s Singham. Ranveer’s very presence typically elevates a movie. But in Cirkus, at best we’re entirely indifferent to him, at worst he’s annoying. Similarly, when you have a large cast made up of a roster of overlooked, wonderful performers, are we to be grateful to see them all on screen together? Or feel bad for them considering they’re all reduced to criminal caricatures?

By the end, Cirkus threw me into a full-blown spiritual crisis. Big movies fall flat all the time, but something about this one in particular, hurt. In 2022, Bollywood blockbusters on the big screen matter. And their failure hits harder. Is this truly what constitutes a massive Hindi movie in 2022? Is this what’s supposed to get people back into theatres? Unbearably goofy facial expression porn masquerading as a movie, the kindest thing I could say about it is: it’s a movie for kids. If you severely dislike your kids, that is.