Barring a few sequences, the humour in ‘Pyare Mohan’ is pretty mundane.
Given the movie’s basic story idea, ‘Pyare Mohan’ could have been an interesting flick. Two friends – one blind and the other deaf – go about their lives with fun and masti without letting their handicap become a weakness. They also fall in love and later on fight the bad guys to save their sweethearts.
The blind-deaf equation itself could have been a source of witty humour. But alas, what we see is nothing more than clichéd, childish and mundane comedy.
The movie’s beginning itself is a bit odd. It begins with an underworld don Tony (Boman Irani) confessing to a priest and later on staging his own killing. An unlikely start for a movie that has comedy as its backbone.
Pyare (Fardeen Khan) is blind as a bat. Day or night, light or darkness makes no difference to him. He goes on morning walks, reads the newspaper upside down and can sense a man’s intention despite his inability to see.
Mohan (Vivek Oberoi) needs just an excuse to break into dance at the slightest opportunity. He is deaf and can’t hear a damn thing, but he shakes his leg to the music, be it a marriage ceremony or (mistakenly) a funeral procession.
Together, Pyare and Mohan are inseparable friends running an Archies shop. But there is something lacking in their lives. It is love.
Cupid strikes when the two meet Priya (Amrita Rao) and Preeti (Esha Deol) during a morning walk. While Pyare is smitten with Preeti, Mohan loses his heart to Priya.
Preeti and Priya are into stage performances. They sing and dance on stage. Their friendship with Pyare and Mohan cements after the two heroes help them during a concert.
Just before the interval point, Pyare and Mohan express their love to Preeti and Priya when the two girls are about to leave for their shows in Bangkok. To their utter shock, their proposal is turned down. Preeti and Priya admit that they have always seen Pyare and Mohan as good friends but they don’t have any romantic feelings for them. Pyare and Mohan are shattered.
Post interval, Tony, the don which the world thought was dead, makes a re-entry, once again with a confession to a priest whom he later kills. Preeti and Priya are arrested by Bangkok police for the murder of the priest. But Tony wants to bump them off because the two girls know his secret.
In this hour of need, Preeti and Priya’s dear ones turn their back to them. Only the blind Pyare and the deaf Mohan, whose love the two belles had rebuked earlier, come to their rescue. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game in which our blind and deaf heroes excel over the baddies.
‘Pyare Mohan’ had the potential to be an entertaining comedy. But the writers have not been able to do justice to the script. The humour in the movie is obviously predictable and absurdly puerile.
Sample this – Mohan, the deaf one, mistaking one word for another. ‘Cake’ for ‘mistake’, ‘dick’ for ‘sick’, ‘bheek’ for ‘theek’ and many more alike. And Pyare, the blind one, mistaking raksha bandhan cards for love cards and mistakenly punching his own friend instead of the bad guy. Mundane stuff that can strike a chord with schoolchildren perhaps, but not with someone looking for good intelligent comedy.
Vivek Oberoi does evoke a few chuckles in some scenes. His very opening scene, when he is dancing in a marriage and unknowingly starts dancing in front of a funeral along side, is funny. Also the look he wears throughout the movie, reading the lips of people speaking to him, gives his character a hilarious touch.
Fardeen Khan looks handsome, but doesn’t impress in comedy. There are certain scenes in which his expressions are plain wooden.
Esha Deol and Amrita Rao react more than act in the movie. Boman Irani is just about ok, playing a stuttering don, who claims his victims with a baseball bat.
Indra Kumar, the movie’s director, showed an incredible command over comedy in his movie ‘Masti’ two years ago. But he disappoints in ‘Pyare Mohan’.
On the whole, ‘Pyare Mohan’ lacks the punch of a comedy film.