Movie Review – Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota

Wicked, Crazy, Fun

It was a film which I had no clue about. And seeing the posters I wasn’t so very keen to watch the movie too but thanks to the ‘Trance’ debacle, I wanted to watch some movie which was fun and a no brainer. Luckily this movie came to be my rescue.

The film starts with someone ready for a fight and about to drop in the midst of it because of dehydration. The shot freezes up in the air and goes for a flashback mode. The voice over too wasn’t really heroic. If that was not weird enough the flashback was even weirder. We get to go to a ‘Midnight’s children’ type of flashback where we start following the hero’s entry even before he was born. The sequence in cinema hall was an interesting one, especially the kick of the hero’s mother. But later we get to know that it really was not her kick indeed and we hear what really happened. There were two or three scenes like that where he tells what really happened and what was his imagination. Being a quirky film, those things work.

Then his mother dies, that too is an interesting scene. It’s not a funny scene as well as it doesn’t have overt sadness attached to it too. But a quaint melodrama which the scene has, that kind of works. Post that our hero is born. He could be rightly called hero because he doesn’t feel any pain. Even though the context needs to be taken in a funny way, it kind of pricked me because I remember reading a news on a similar disorder where a kid doesn’t feel any pain. That news was so similar to this film where they had given him goggles as he pokes his eyes. But what caught me the most was the sentence where it was mentioned that he would chew his tongue like a bubble gum. So as soon as I heard that the hero wouldn’t be having any pain that was the first thing which came to my mind.

This film had a different type of ‘jump scare’. We get scared every time he tries to jump. Especially as a kid, Surya’s (Sartaaj Kakkar/Abhimanyu Dassani) antics were terrific. It was scary and fun, just like a ride in theme park. And his grandfather Aajoba (Mahesh Manjrekar) was a super hippy. His role was terrific, which he does it to elan. In a film which was about men, a man to be precise. The lady scores superbly. Surpiya (Radhika Madan) was terrific. She could effortlessly blend the image of action queen and a doting daughter in her. I loved the scene where she talks with her mother especially. And how the salwar clad face doesn’t suit her at all. The scene where she escapes from the airport and removes bindi was top notch. It was like a wonder woman sequence. Heroinic scene to be precise. In fact, her very entry was fabulous. Generally, when a female character gets introduced as a fighter, she’d we wearing pants. As if no crisis would occur for a girl with other dresses. So here she is in short skirt and still fighting the villains. It was a welcome change from a regular template.

For a film with this type of story it’s tough to maintain the quirkiness throughout the film. That’s where it succeeds. There was not a single dull moment in the film. The success lies in the fact that it effortlessly mingles the story with humor as well as sentiment and doesn’t go overboard with both of them. People who have known more about yesteryear Hindi film would have relished it even more because a lot of old songs were used. But even without knowing it, the feel works.