STORY: An out-of-work writer, who operates out of a mall, gets to write his life’s biggest movie. The only sad part is that the producer wants him to deliver a flop.
REVIEW:
Yeh Hai Lollipop, the title bearing no semblance to anything in the movie, is a mall-film which is a decade too late, considering the mall boom is not a new thing in India. A producer looking to avoid the tax man needs a flop film and hires the services of Masoom (Om Puri), a failed writer who works out of a food court at the local mall. The money is good, so he agrees to write and weaves the story around the characters he sees in the mall/ office. There is the Chaplinesque eve-teaser (Rajpal Yadav), the serial polygamist (Tiku Talsania), the hero who is also a salesman in the mall (Chirag Thakkar) and his heroine, the food court head (Shilpa Anand). There’s also a weirdo (Sanjay Mishra), who keeps a bunch of official ID cards and butts into people’s lives.
The film is not about whether Masoom can deliver his script in time. It’s more about him discovering the lives of the characters around him, which takes up the entire first half. It would’ve helped if the humour hadn’t missed the mark almost all the time. The jokes are mostly film industry-related, which is trivia that someone who isn’t from the industry can hang on to. That’s literally the only takeaway.
The story does show promise in the second half for a brief moment and there’s a decent twist, too, that one could genuinely not foresee. However, the snail’s pace at which the story moves and its two-dimensional execution, weighs the film down completely. Om Puri looks as if he’s just going through his lines to get the whole thing over with soon. In the end, his character does get the perfect story and the perfect end for his film. But do the actual audience get anything even close to that? Barely.
The story does show promise in the second half for a brief moment and there’s a decent twist, too, that one could genuinely not foresee. However, the snail’s pace at which the story moves and its two-dimensional execution, weighs the film down completely. Om Puri looks as if he’s just going through his lines to get the whole thing over with soon. In the end, his character does get the perfect story and the perfect end for his film. But do the actual audience get anything even close to that? Barely.
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