The shaadi goes off without a hitch. But the suhaag raat in a luxury hotel suite is rudely scuttled by armed goons. As the new bride hopes to get the marital union to a warm start, the uninvited guests knock on the door. What happens next is nothing like anything that the lady would have anticipated.
Ahead of her is a night to remember and, just as much, a night to forget. The intruders demand to know where “Charlie” is. The groom, scared out of his wits, has no clue what the gun-waving men are talking about. They will not take “I don’t know” for an answer.
The woman isn’t one to take anything lying down, least of all the shenanigans of the thugs or the many avowed frailties of her husband. All hell breaks loose. That is how Dhoom Dhaam, a rom-com caper out on Netflix, kicks off (of course, not before a quick prelude designed to set the tone for the rest of the film).
In this baraat-and-bedlam action comedy produced and co-written by Aditya Dhar and directed by Rishab Seth, chaos is the principal currency. The opening sequence foreshadows the pandemonium that is about to erupt and interrupt the married couple’s first night together.
As the on-the-run couple – they are still in their post-nuptial finery – swerve in and out of trouble, they, only a few hours into the marriage, begin to wonder if they are compatible at all. That the two are completely mismatched holds the key to the drama and adds to the mayhem.
Dhoom Dhaam makes a song and dance – no, there are no conventional musical set pieces in the film but Shor Police (Clinton Cerejo and Bianca Gomes) dish out a few solid numbers – about the wife, drag racer extraordinaire, being much stronger and more assertive than her man, a veterinarian who is a bundle of phobias.
The two take to their heels with the goons in hot pursuit. The running – and driving and dodging – never stops as the mystery surrounding Charlie deepens and a few more men jump into the fray in quest of something that the married couple do not have the foggiest idea about.
In the course of the night, Koyal Chadda (Yami Gautam Dhar), a feisty Punjabi from Mumbai, gives as good as she gets while the hubby, Veer Poddar (Pratik Gandhi), a self-effacing guy from Ahmedabad, ties himself up in knots. He refuses to break rules and jump traffic signals, both of which come easy to the lady.
For Yami Gautam Dhar, Dhoom Dhaam represents a first. She has never done comedy of this kind. Pratik Gandhi, on the other hand, has given such madcap capers a shot or two before and with a fair bit of success.
As a couple who have nothing in common but are hitched to each other by fate and thrown into a major snowballing crisis by circumstances beyond their control, the leads are like a house on fire. But no matter how much energy they exude, the film struggles to keep up. The making is flawless but the writing is passable only in spurts.
There are plot twists aplenty in Dhoom Dhaam. None of them takes you by surprise. It is a bit like when the heroine hurls a flurry of cuss words at a guy threatening the couple on a phone call, the expletives are drowned out by the background score. The film wants us to respond to what it is seeking to achieve – unadulterated amusement – but never quite pulls out all the stops.
It tickles the funny bone often enough. If there is one genuinely humorous moment in the film, it is this: the hero says he is vegetarian. The asks why. His deadpan reply: “Animal doctor hoon. I cannot eat my patients.”
A couple of other sequences stand out for sure. In one, Koyal launches into a diatribe in defence of the lies that women have to resort to in order to be free in a conservative society that gives them no leeway unless it is snatched. For the actor, this is the absolute high point of the film and she makes the most of it.
In the other, Veer, who does little to live up to his name when he is stalked by danger, throws caution to the wind and holds fort during a bachelorette performance where a crowd of screaming women go, “Strip!
Strip!” He obliges them. He loses his clothes but not his composure. He dances gleefully in his boxers.
This unsubtle but passable upending of the male voyeuristic gaze that Hindi films usually perpetuate has the desired impact because Gandhi, in keeping with the spirit of the scene, does not hold back. He dives in headlong and seems to be having a lot of fun in the bargain. You wonder: is the character finally coming into his own and is about to catch up with his tough-cookie wife?
The answer is no. Soon enough, the guy is back to his meek ways – here is a male in a Hindi film who is not averse to owning up to his many fears and even volunteers to go in for “exposure therapy” – and the woman is compelled to take control again.
The actors playing the parents pop in and out of the film without making any impression, but Kavin Dave as the girl’s maternal uncle and Mukul Chadda as a cop who has many a secret up his sleeve make their presence felt despite severely limited scope.
In the climax, staged in a warehouse where everybody congregates, with the police predictably being the last to arrive, a pet canine steals some of the limelight. With a “doggie doctor” – that is what the wife calls him when she is in a foul mood – in the mix, it is hardly surprising that the dog has his day.
Dhoom Dhaam is harmless diversion with a few stray sparks, but it isn’t as much fun as it aspires to be. But if at the same time it isn’t all unmitigatedly vacuous, much of the credit should accrue to the lead actors. Full marks to them for gamely trying to spice up a desultory ride.
