There are movies where you want to sit straight, 15 minutes after the start, and ask the director, ‘What were you smokin’ bro?’ These are movies that, like they say, should have never seen the light of day. These are movies where you wonder, ‘Fine, the director was out of his mind, what about the actors? What were they up to!’ Mithai is one such movie.
Mithai parades as a dark comedy, but it is neither dark nor comedic. It is the tale of two alcoholic-losers, who spend all day drinking. One of them gets drunk and crashes at his home with the door ajar, only to find himself in vomit the next day and half the things in his house stolen, including a locket he was due to gift the girlfriend he was going to wed in three days. The rest of the movie is about these two friends searching for his things, because some pretentious friend of theirs in a bright red blazer (like you can rent something more soothing, bro) challenges his masculinity, asking him to catch the thief before he earns the right to get married. Are you tripping yet? Worst bachelor party in a movie ever!
Mithai, the movie, is so ridiculously made, it makes you wonder whose idea of comedy it is. Sample this: the two guys find the stolen locket being worn by a random woman they see in a pub. They trace her back to her house – accidentally again, after losing sight of her midway. She just hands over the locket to them and tells them her boyfriend gave it to her. They just randomly end up at the boyfriend’s house who apparently hasn’t gotten out of his home for two months, has a goat for a pet and is at least in his forties. Despite that, he takes these two guys, who break into his house and drink all his scotch, around the city to help them find their stuff – worst good Samaritan ever portrayed in a movie. Oh, he even breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience. It is like some ‘dude’ randomly decided to make an intellectual movie but forgot that the average IQ of people in an intellectual movie isn’t hovering around 0.
They meet a detective who talks about world issues on the phone – lo and behold, Trump and Kim Jong-un problem explained using two butt-naked kids. Worst visual analogy ever. Worst detective ever!
Amidst these weird set of events is plenty of cheap graphics and camera experiments – remember the kind final year engineers do in their project to hide how bad it is. Worst visual effects ever. And then there is a ‘musician’ whose idea of dressing smart is a blazer with buttons open over his pot belly and a tie around his neck. Worst costume-design ever!
Some of us movie-lovers were interested in the movie because we thought, hey, it features two of the most talented sidekicks in the Telugu industry right now – Rahul Ramakrishna and Priyadarshi. How bad can it be! Mithai bad, really. Rahul has just one expression throughout the movie – the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-this-ridiculous-movie emoji. Priyadarshi, who wakes up on two different days in briefs – thank you director for the visuals – gives the impression of someone who got punch drunk because no sober actor would agree to be part of the ridiculous, brain-numbing experiment that this movie is. You almost wish there was someone on the sets who could see the absurdity and inform the makers that this story was going nowhere. But, hey, it was produced, directed and written by the same person.
Thanks, but no thanks for probably what will be by a country mile the most nightmarish Telugu movie of 2019. I wonder how the story-writer sold it to the actors. ‘Hey man, I don’t have a story but I can make some graphics and let’s all act funny and drunk and shoot that.’
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.