Fukrey 3: All About, Quite Literally, Toilet Humour

THERE are films with toilet humour and there are films like Fukrey 3, which drag humour to the toilet. Every moment, every scene, every joke in this Mrighdeep Singh Lamba outing has been designed, thought of, and orchestrated as an excuse to talk about shit and urine. As if the director and the writer (Vipul Vig), the original conspirators of the franchise, went to the loo several times when facing creative bankruptcy and then did the most natural thing in the world. They looked down and thought: “Wait, why don’t we make this the story?”

If you are telling me that this is not what happened, that two people actually did sit down and write Fukrey 3, and that more people sitting in important positions heard the plan and agreed to it, then I have a question — when did we come to this? When did we reach that stage in filmmaking where the sight of an actor urinating is the plot and the joke, the social message and the punchline? When did we sign up to watch scenes and scenes of Pulkit Samrat and Varun Sharma exercising and drinking water because some bright bulb in the writing room came up with a creative intervention so bizarre that it will put the entire Housefull series to shame? When did it become acceptable to make the whole story revolve around one man urinating and one man sweating because apparently, if you can somehow find a way to throw a diamond into someone’s stomach, both these liquids can make petrol together? When did we stop teaching Chemistry in school?

What has happened with Fukrey 3 is what happens with most successful franchises. Once the initial films are successful, the producers keep expanding the series to cater to an existing audience and milking it for money. The actors are given nothing to work with as the quality of scripts falls more steeply than any market can recover from. But what has happened with Fukrey 3 is also a case study unto itself, in the way it makes it abundantly clear the extent to which production houses take the audience for granted for the sake of money.

To be fair, there is only so much one can do with the original premise. In Delhi four slacker friends — Choocha (Sharma), Hunny (Samrat), Lali (Manjot Singh) and Zafar Bhai (Ali Fazal) — are trying to earn money by doing nothing. Then, there is a local goon called Bholi Punjaban (Richa Chadha), and Pandit (Pankaj Tripathi), the guard of the college these men went to, who are thrown in the mix. I understand the limitation but Fukrey 3 also unfolds with an indifference that increasingly feels that neither the director nor the writer cared at all in making the film. Scenes after scenes continue to make one point. One. The characters (Fazal is missing from the action; bless him) are taken to South Africa so that one of them can swallow the diamond. Later there is an elaborate and frankly unnecessary sequence of Choocha and Hunny getting electrocuted so that the writing can arrive at one scene where both the characters sweat and urinate together. I wish I was making this up but here we are.

Fukrey 3 is so far from the points it wants to make (corrupted politicians wanting to win elections for their own benefit, man-made water shortage in the country, poor people being denied their basic rights) that they look like dots. All the actors look disinterested. The sight of Tripathi going on with this charade is particularly worrying because his increasing presence in films which do not deserve him is slowly taking away the joy of watching him on screen. In case his elaborate ploy of making petrol with two men’s bodily fluids does not work, Lamba also includes plenty of racist jokes. Chadha’s character (somehow) has two Black bodyguards who she refers to as ‘Bob Marley’. There is also another Black woman called Mombasa who everyone freely keeps referring to as “Mosambi”, “Mufasa”. The writing is so random that at one point, Samrat’s character looks at the water scarcity in Delhi and says, “Hum India ko Syria aur Delhi ko Baghdad banne nahi denge”. I mean we have not even recovered from a film which compared marital strife to Auschwitz.

Amidst all this tomfoolery awaits a crocodile (surviving in chlorine water) . It was resting in the water park when hordes of people disrupted its habitat. The reptile growled and snarled but just when the moment arrived for it to eat them all up, the crocodile hid under the water. You can call it a subversion but to my eyes it only becomes clear that the makers of Fukrey 3 understand neither chemistry nor biology.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)