Rating: ** 1/2
Netflix’s new muddle mystery Murder Mubarak is like Agatha Christie on uppers. Or maybe we can just call it Knives Ouch and be done with it. Homi Adajania, the wizard of wackiness, loves to play around with genres.
He also loves to cast Dimple Kapadia as these very strange women who give eccentricity a bad name. In Murder Mubarak (congratulations, it’s a dud) Dimple plays Cookie a well, kookie high-society creature who dresses up like Elton John and thinks herself hysterically classy. She is of course one of the murder suspects—how she could not, our wintry Bobby!—and so is Tisca Chopra as Roshni Batra(affectionately known as ‘Rosh’) who flirts till it hurts and makes eyes at everything that moves. She also has the best line in the 2 hour 20 minutes of gruelling hedonism: “Rich people can’t even crack a joke”
Rosh’s joke being, “The poor must die.”
Apparently the super-rich say such things and everyone laughs. Investigative officer Pankaj Tripathi looks thoroughly bored all through. Whether it is the character or the actor stricken with incurable ennui, one can’t tell. But Pankaj looked just as bored playing the statesman Atal Bihari Vajpayee some weeks ago. Maybe it is time for the overworked actor to take a break?
The young actor who plays Pankaj’s assistant Padam(Priyank Tiwari) looks far more interested in goings-on. If there is an award for best ensemble-salvaging performance , this actor should get it.
The intended humour of a bunch of high-end wastrels being murder suspects dries up long before Vijay Varma and Sara Ali Khan hit the sack at precisely 1 hour and 26 minutes of playingtime when the party is on full-swing.
Kudos to Vijay Varma. After Lust Stories he has become the best kisser on the OTT platform. Vijay plays a lawyer and Sara, I am sorry to say , plays a liar. She is apparently a widow. But Vijay doesn’t mind. Lust, like love and mediocrity, know no bounds.
The wall-to-wall carpeting of characters in this blinding blizzard and blood and blah, not only accentuates the hollowness of the rich and privileged, but also exposes the sheer aimlessness of the writing(Suprotim Sengupta, Ghazal Dhaliwal).
Agreed, the film is about brainless greed. But did it have to be so enamoured of vacuousness? The characters speak in giggly circumvent riddles which give nothing away probably because there is nothing to give away, except their lack of focus.
In one sequence in a church for a prayer meeting, Karisma Kapoor(yes, she is in it too) bursts into a rehearsed soliloquy on women’s rights and privilege. She is liberated of opportune timing.
Pankaj Tripathi as Bhavani looks even more bored than ever listening to Karisma vent . By the time he solves the case and we know who the murderer is, Bhavani looks as though he couldn’t care less.We second that emotion.
