Hindi cinema has a long and repeated history of films made blindly following the trend. A big number of box office failures have been there in the recent past, for this very reason taking the viewers for granted, offering them the same kind of content every month or so. The three types of trends repeatedly followed by the production houses in the last decade are biographical movies (mainly sports biographies), horror or horror-comedies, and nationalistic films revisiting history or based on similar characters.
Bhoot Police is just another project forcibly conceived as a horror-comedy post the success of Stree following a similar kind of format. It had a potential premise of two ghost-hunting brothers on an assignment of capturing a demonic spirit haunting the small population of a tea estate. But the writing and the direction remain unable to present it in any highly engaging or entertaining form.
The film begins as an exciting adventure movie instead of a horror-comedy and one starts expecting some great enjoyable drama to unfold soon with actors like Saif Ali Khan and Javed Jaffery in form with their witty one-liners. However, the excitement ends, the moment they all reach their new destination of the haunted tea-estate meeting the local people.
From here onwards the film starts derailing and never comes back on track with occasional funny moments in between a completely predictable watch. Directed by Pavan Kirpalani, it also has the lead actors taking digs on trending topics such as girl-child education, nepotism in Bollywood, go-corona-go, and more. The film mocks the fake tantriks but in the process mocks the horror genre too, contradicting its purpose of making. That remains the key reason, it miserably fails as a horror film and might appeal to the kids offering clean family entertainment with a lot of childish humour. If the performances need to be mentioned, then here we have Arjun and Yami seriously trying to save the film that otherwise rarely gets lifted by the acts of Saif, Jacquelin, and the supporting cast.
In short, this certainly could have been a good watch continuing in the tone of its initial 10 minutes. However, the director misses another opportunity of making it big as his fourth suspense-horror film having the biggest cast.
Rating : 2 / 5
(Direct release at Disney+ Hotstar)
Tags :
BHOOT POLICE Review by Bobby Sing at bobbytalkscinema.com, New Hindi films reviews by Bobby Sing, Hindi Horror comedy movies.
