Don Muthuswami: He will kill you with laughter till you cry for mercy!
If anything can be called history repeated, then this is an example par excellence. Mithun is back and how! Mimoh’s Jimmy fell flat at the box office and now it is father Mithun’s turn to give a film that fails to create any impression. We never doubted this actor’s performance but with such a rough-cut role, one can hardly breathe, as it happened here. Haven’t we seen Mithun in a similar get up in Agneepath, I mean in a lungi, and if we liked him there does not necessarily mean that it can be done again.
An eccentric father’s search for an ideal groom for pampered daughter has enough masala to make you spill into laughter but not with Mithun style fun. The desi disco dancer has a huge fan following who even sustained his B-grade movies with some great hyperbolic stunts and idiotic dialogues a decade ago. There is a particular sect of audience who has bestowed their love on this actor even after he became repetitive. Say for example, ask any rickshaw wala, who is his favorite, the answer no doubt will be Mithun Chakroborty but I guess, this time, even those fans cannot help him survive at the box office.
Rating: 2/5
If you had expected Mithun to really show a tip or two to son Mimoh then you are going to be greatly disappointed. Talking about comebacks, Guru could have been ideally called his come back. He showed well-executed power, controlled expressions and maturity with deep understanding on the art called acting.
Don Muthuswami is the only full-fledged feature film that showcased Mithun after Gunda, a sort of an extinct class of cinema. If anyone thought that when action films don’t work then comedy films would be easy enough to carry, then it is not such an easy cup of tea. Irony being the lighter skills to tickle your funny bones always requires a stronger control!
The thin line between pure comedy and farcical absurdities is that comedy takes a far more subtle hand and treatment, the right ingredients or masala, so that it doesn’t go overboard and start dripping to the wrong side. A film that has hardly to tell anything other than Mithun looking jocular in a southern get-up, Don Muthuswami is not the kind of film you would like to remember. If the film is able to entertain at times is simply because of Mithun.
The film revolves around Don Muthuswami (of course, Krishna Iyer M.A. Narialpaniwala reborn, Mithun Chakraborty), who in order to fulfill the last wish of his father wants to turn to a right path after getting his only daughter Sanjana (Hrishita Bhatt) married. The ideal groom according to him is Pradhan, an underworld don and the son of his good friend Don Vardhan. Sanjana, however, has her own plansand has no intention of getting into a relation with a don and loves Jaikishan (Mohit Raina), the Urdu/Hindi teacher who has been appointed to help the conversion of Don Muthuswami to a esteemed Sir Muthuswami.
Meanwhile the don’s assistant cum accountant Preetam (Rohit Roy) comes and confesses that he loves his daughter and wants to marry her revealing in the process that he has been stealing money from him and has become a millionaire. Now, in the background the Don’s henchmen have become domestic helps after quitting their practiced profession.
Things get more complicated with Don Muthuswami as he learns about the pregnancy of his daughter and simultaneously another beautiful girl Ranjans (Anusmriti) comes into the picture saying that Preetam loves her thinking that she is the don’s daughter. Now Don Muthuswami is fully confused along with the audience, who is who and who is pregnant with whose child. More and more characters get to the already confused situation and finally you are left at loggerheads.
Shakti Samanta is no doubt one of the power-packed film maker Bollywood had, but Asim Samanta doesn’t seem to stand upto the legacy. This film can have various interpretations but over all it is pretty forgettable.
The cinematography by Harish Joshi is fitting the bill and there are some witty dialogues as well but these features get perished in the bigger picture.
The music by Anu Malik is typical and nothing great about it.
Acting wise nobody stands out other than Mithun. Shakti Kapoor is a complete waste in the film, Hrishitha does an ok yet, irrepressibly loud sort of appearance. Rohit Roy, Mohit Raina and Anusmriti had hardly any meat to show off. Over all, the film is good only for TV with nothing else in hand to do!
