Dhamaal: A fun filled movie

This review of the movie will essentially have the story as well, so at any point if you think that your surprise element of the movie is getting spoiled, stop reading at that point of time.
Dhamaal, a name for a comedy. So off I went into the theater, thinking that with the spate of comedies that we have seen recently and with many of them being somewhat ribald and raunchy, there would be a spate of heroines with short hemlines and lots of skin display; I was pleasantly surprised. This was a pretty clean movie from the context of double meaning dialogues as well, a good family movie.
It's a different matter that the opinion of this sort of movie varies a lot. I know a lot of people who would consider the spate of incidents and accidents that befall the characters in this movie as contrived and not worth laughing at; I however am not one of them. I enjoyed the movie and laughed with everybody else in the hall at the continuous spate of humorous incidents that happen in the movie.


The movie stars a number of people some of whom are good in comedy, some of whom make people laugh with their deadpan style of dialogue delivery. Sanjay Dutt is an excellent example of a person who delivers his style and dialogues in a pure deadpan way, and the humour stands out. Javed Jafferey is styled as a dim-wit, the brother of Arshad Warsi, and Javed stands out in his role of a person who cannot be trusted to keep a secret or know what to say when, and by the end of the movie, you know that he can counted upon to reveal things which would rather not be disclosed. Riteish Deshmukh as usual is a character who emotes humour with his face and eyes, and he does a fair job at that. Arshad Warsi is seemingly the most ruthless of the lot in terms of planning. And then there is Ashish Choudhury, who is utterly scared of his father Asrani, who loves his car more than he loves Ashish.
With these cast of characters, you know that the movie will have a riot of incidents one after the other, and that is exactly what happens. These 4, Ashish, Javed, Arshad and Riteish are good for nothing characters, not working and enjoying from day to day based on their skills at conning people. Once, when conning the family of a dead person, they are wrongly picked up by a cop for murder, but then released on a mountain road when the truth becomes clear. There they watch an accident, and hear the last words of a crook, Bose (Prem Chopra) who tells them where his money is buried in Goa.
When Tikku Talsania (the police chief) and Sanjay Dutt (a police inspector) hear about this, they are shocked. They have been chasing Bose for 10 years and want to get back the money he had made. Sanjay Dutt eventually makes the 4 reveal the money details that Bose had told them (with Javed playing the dimwit revealing the details). Soon, they all part acrimoniously to go their own separate ways over the proposed division of the money. This is soon shown figuratively in the way that they try to be the first one and kill the other's chance of doing so.
What follows is the attempts of all of them to be the first one to reach Goa and the incidents that they have in the process. There are some notable ones, with Ashish and Asrani in a plane where the pilot has become unconscious and the attempt to get them down, Sanjay Dutt driving a bus that soon leads him hanging from a cliff, Ritesh getting stuck with some dacoits the leader of whom becomes part of the party, and so on. The end has a twist in terms of what happens when they finally find the money.

Comedy scene from the movie: