Family Pack is being marketed as an “endearing tale of human emotions”. Forty-five minutes into the film, every human emotion within me has died, and I am left staring at the screen wondering listlessly when the film will draw to an end.
Directed by Arjun Kumar S, this supernatural comedy is about a young man named Abhi (Likith Shetty), who decides to end his life because of “love failure”. Now if you’re imagining something on the scale of Devdas, Romeo and Juliet, Heer Ranjha and so on, please lower your expectations. Abhi decides to take this drastic decision though he knows absolutely nothing about his crush, a woman who calls herself Baby Boo (Amrutha Iyengar), short for Bhoomika. Boo walks around the college campus shooting random videos with the wide grin of a preschooler. Her characterisation doesn’t go beyond that. Boo hoo.
Abhi’s other great tragedy is that his father (Achyuth Kumar) divorced his mother and has been married twice since. Though he’s in college, he has to shuttle between their two homes because they have joint custody (!!). The romance between the father and his new mother is also written with the same depth as Abhi’s romance with Boo; that is, Level Teaspoon. The director tries hard with the valiant background music to show you that something very, very, very funny is happening on screen but it’s about as hilarious as tickling yourself and waiting for the laughs.
Rangayana Raghu appears as a ghost who also has a love story of his own. There’s nothing otherworldly about this either. The men in Family Pack just fall for any woman who catches their eye. The female actors could have been replaced with mannequins and it would have made no difference. They wear nice clothes, makeup and simper around mouthing inanities.
There is, of course, a connection between the ghost and Abhi — which you will discover if you manage to stay awake till that point. This plotline, however, does nothing to improve the film, it only makes it worse, with a distasteful comedy track on Abhi hitting on his girlfriend’s mother.
The screenplay has the finesse of a skit, jumping chaotically from scene to scene without adding anything meaningful to the story. The actors know that they’re in a silly film, so they do nothing to salvage the situation and go through the motions. The visual effects are funnier than anything else happening on screen. It’s fine to make a film that doesn’t take itself seriously, but that is not the same as creating a film where even the filmmaking isn’t taken seriously.
At under two hours, Family Pack feels like an endurance test that most are likely to fail unless they’re film critics with rhino hides who’ve been subjected to one too many bad films in their lifetime.
The film is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.