Rating :*

There are some comedies that make you wish laughter had never been invented. "Fool & Final" is the most grotesque travesty of tinsel titters that man ever had a chance to invent.

It's ridiculously blasé about its brainlessness and pointedly brazen in its burlesque. The comic-book mode of filmmaking is far from amusing. In fact the purpose and pacing of the humour is embarrassingly awry.

Very honestly, I thought I had gone to see a comedy. But hey ... this is a suspense thriller! It just makes you scratch your head in disbelief. Why did they make this film? Why did actors of varied means and talent agree to be in this fatuous farce? Who's the biggest fool? The people who expect the audience to sit through this giggly garbage, or the audience?

The suspense just assails and finally numbs your senses.

So much brain-dead slapstick packaged into one film ... Gosh, who thought of this fearful oddity? The producer, known for his stylish comedies set in Dubai, or the director? Known to make stars with two left legs dance, this time Ahmed Khan makes a truckload of stars shake more than just shake their legs.

Every 'actor' (if we can call some of the cheese-and-ham performers actors) is at his or her hammiest summit. Every sequence has at least a dozen or more stars making faces into the camera. It's truly heart-rending to see actors like Shahid Kapoor(Vivah) and Ayesha Takia (Dor) peering into the lens as though it were a barbed fence dividing sanity from profanity?

As for the senior brigade, you cringe each time Sharmila Tagore goes 'Beta' to Shahid and Om Puri goes 'Puttar' to Deol.

Paresh Rawal and Johnny Lever, doing Dumb and Dumber (the audience for this dumbed-down comedy being considered the dumbest) are supposed to be the human equivalent of Tom and Jerry. The characters speak Anurag Kashyap's dialogues with an acute stress on the punctuations.

The exclamation marks leave their mark on the frames. Fool & Final is the cinematic equivalent of a loud tattoo being drilled into a beefy arm. An image emerges painfully. But the picture on the forearm is frisky.

The cartoon-strip format is stripped down and robbed off the playful and parodic aura. What we see is what we regret.

Not all of the 59 (or is it 61?) characters fit in. But are they meant to belong in the first place?

Ahmed Khan directs the characters in what's arguably the corniest caper ever produced, as though they were all Dubai-bound tourists who are lost in transit.

You wish the same could have happened to the prints of this pathetic parody.