Varun Dhawan and Sara Ali Khan’s Christmas release on Amazon Prime seems a poor cover of the original, raising one important question – why even reboot the old hits?

Coolie No. 1
Cast: Varun Dhawan, Sara Ali Khan, Paresh Rawal
Director: David Dhawan

David Dhawan, the master of madcap cinema, whose favourite playing field remained farce and the ridiculous, had the strange ability to make every scene a rib tickler. With Kader Khan’s dialogues and the nimble-footed Govinda’s spot-on comic timings, you didn’t want to examine the script. But, you miss that spontaneity in Coolie No 1, Dhawan’s rework of his hit from quarter of a century ago. May be the original was never a perfect product but it was always light on its feet.

This time it’s the director’s son, actor Varun Dhawan, one answering to the call of ‘Aaaeee Coolie’. Although, Senior Dhawan hasn’t changed the story,but he offers no surprises for those of us who went to a single-screen theatre to catch the original. Instead, he adds a flashy wardrobe and off you go a 1995 hit ready for an all-new audience.

Kader Khan’s Seth Hoshiyarchand is now Goa hotelier Jeffery Rozario (Paresh Rawal) who wants to find a stinking rich husband for his daughter Sarah (Sara Ali Khan).

Meanwhile, Rozario who is looking for the richest man ever for his daughter, insults the Jai Kishen, a matchmaker played by Jaaved Jaffrey, a 2020 version of Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s Shadiram Gharjode who thereafter seeks to avenge the insult. He convinces a railway porter Raju (Varun Dhawan) to play the rich suitor Kunwar Raj Pratap Singh. Getting happy at the thought of immense wealth, Rozario gets Raju married to his daughter, but soon realises everything is not as it seems. In order to distract him, Raju puts up the story of having a twin, adding more confusion to an already overflowing plot.

Although the movie have some funny moments, which can largely be owed to Varun Dhawan’s enthusiasm and spontaneity. As the ruffian Raju, he gets to utilise his love for broad, physical comedy as he mimics Mithun Chakraborty, complete with the pelvic thrusts. Other supporting actors include Paresh Rawal, Javed, Johnny Lever, Rajpal Yadav and Sahil Vaid.

The movie’s plot is hopelessly out of sync with today’s time. Men getting hit in gonads and women being made victims of casual sexism. Speech impairment is mined for laughs, as is people’s weight along with tasteless and unfunny joke on corona virus.

You wriggle in your seat as the greedy father throws his daughters at the rich suitor, forgetting that we live in a century very different from when this was originally written. Things reach a point too often in Coolie No 1 when such lunacy is too much to swallow, especially when no chuckles follow.

The VFX sequences in the film can be a briefing on how not to use CGI. Quality is so poor that you can actually make out where green screen was used.

With the sharp writing and editing missing, Coolie No 1 is but a poor reproduction of the original. For those who are asking us not to compare the 1995 hit with the 2020 product, answer is why the makers are giving us a copy in the first place. This is not a reboot, it feels like a satire and it is best not to tamper with nostalgia.