The year is 1942, and the city is Rohit Shetty’s Bangalore & it starts with Roy Jamnadas of Jamnadas Orphanage (from Golmaal) experimenting with interchanging two sets of identical twins just to prove Parrish (upbringing) > khoon (blood relation). Yes, people were that free back in the day. Also, wow, the parents name all 4 kids Roy (Ranveer Singh), and Joy (Varun Sharma) with respect to the founders of the orphanage. Getting inspired by Gulzar’s classic Angoor which itself was a remake of Do Dooni Char which was based on William Shakespeare’s ‘The Comedy Of Errors’, the hot mess created here results in nothing but momentarily funny chaos.
The ‘current’ gag will make you laugh at first, and smile when it appears again eventually making you furious because an average joke could only make you laugh once. Dialogues by Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre & Vidhi Ghodgaonkar move from ‘slapstick’ to ‘slapstick’ really soon. The emotional crux of the film to prove upbringing is more important than blood relationships gets lost when the film tries hard to be funny.
Apart from these 2, the whole bunch of comedians is stuffed because they boast of a lot of funny things in their filmography & Cirkus won’t be one of them. I absolutely loved Ranveer Singh in Simmba & Sooryavanshi because of the eccentricity his character serves, but here he’s a misfit of epic proportions. He acts like he had to do this as a favour to Rohit Shetty. None of the other performances deserves to be even mentioned separately.
Rohit’s films have never boasted of having great songs but they haven’t been as bad as this one. Three songs & I don’t even remember the other 2 apart from the trailer’s Current Laga. All said and done, Rohit Shetty & Ranveer Singh’s Cirkus simultaneously overstuffed & yet malnourished. A lot is going on but nothing makes you stay back & laugh your heart out.
Rating: 5/10