Grand Masti: Movie Review

                                 

I don’t like to come off as a movie snob, but when my friends who are highly intelligent and capable individuals recommend movies like Grand Masti to me, I can’t help but wonder why I am friends with these schmucks. I love and respect them of course, but it makes me question how anyone with a functioning brain can enjoy dog barf that is Grand Masti. Now don’t get me wrong we all have our guilty pleasure, but Grand Masti does not and cannot qualify as guilty pleasure. Unless your guilty pleasure is very bad porn fantasy of a 15 year old.

From what I can gather, Grand Masti is directed by pubescent boys who recently discovered their sexuality, and have very little concept of what actually goes on in college. Grand Masti is sequel to mildly successful 2004’s Masti. At the time I was in my teens and I have very little recollection of the movie. However I do remember enjoying it. Not a great movie mind you, but overall a fun murder cover-up with good music and message (at least the message I got from it at the time). 

Grand Masti takes place six years after the events of the original and it seems very little has changed in the lives of our three heroes, Meet (Vivek Oberoi), Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) and Amar (Ritesh Deshmukh). They’re still very horny and their wives are still too busy to satisfy their gluttonous sexual appetite. So how to they remedy their sexless marriages? Well, by going back to their glory days of college where the three followed the philosophy of ABC; which stands for Ass, Boobs, and C for (well, it rhymes with hunt). Yeah, that’s the extent of humor in this movie.

 A college reunion and busy schedules of their wives presents our heroes with an opportunity to go back and for the lack of better words, get some. So they decide to go back to college on their own and maybe partake in those famous collage orgies India is so famous for. 

    Upon their return to college they discover that their ‘sex-topian’ college feels like a monastery where and any interaction between opposite sexes strictly forbidden. All this prudishness is thanks to college principle Robert Pereira (Pradeep Rawat) who has a zero tolerance policy towards sex. Any guy caught hitting on a girl will be hung from a tree and will be shamed in front of everyone by having his underwear pulled down. And why such strict rules towards fraternization you may ask? Is it to preserve a standard of education? No, try again. Is it to insure that female students on campus can feel safe? Haha, nope, nice try though. It turns out that the zero tolerance policy is due to principle’s impotence. That’s right folks, the big twist in the end is if he can’t get some, then no one will. 

This movie is worse than some fan-made movies, but at least you can excuse the fans for being armatures. These are professionals, working in Bollywood for years; there is no excuse for such a movie. All that is going for it is exaggerated facial expressions, horrible puns, and painfully cheap sex humor. The movie has zero originality to a point where it literally stole the shadow tent scene from ‘Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me’. To compensate for lack of originality some genius thought it would be a good idea to have wave after wave of  scantily clad women.  

I’d like to ask the actresses in this movie about their presumptively deplorable financial situation because why else would they agree to do such a B-grade porn-esque movie. If India was progressing with women’s rights and equality; this movie is a stark reminder that the mainstream media and Bollywood (much like it’s Western counterparts or even taking cues from them) allow patriarchy to thrive and the hyper-sexualization/reduction of women as merely sexual objects even as it portrays it as just innocent, deliciously naughty fun. One must remember that South-east Asian society in some quarters still considers healthy discussions of sexuality as taboo and has notoriously given men a license to being sexually adventurous/abusive while it equally denies women implicitly the right to their own sexuality and to rejecting their objectification by Bollywood which remains mainly the playing ground of rich, monopolist dynasties of film-making/financing men. The men in this movie are no more than bewildered, sex-starved buffoons who find it ‘grand masti’ to objectify women and openly flaunt their perversions and lack of sexual control. Two scenes in particular stood out:

1.    The three heroes are stuck at a bank robbery, and the only way they can resolve the situation is if a beautiful woman strike sexy poses so one of the three who works at the bank can press the security alarm with his erection that is conveniently placed right under it. Yeah let that sink in for a minute.
2.    It’s the final confrontation between the heroes and the bad guys. They all end up hanging from a building and only way to save them if three women our heroes were fooling around with striped down to their undies to form a rope. Indian ingenuity at its finest ladies and gentlemen.

But Grand Masti is an adult movie with adult humor, why does it matter if there are random naked women in it? That could be a good argument only if the movie had the least bit of decency to make an attempt at originality. Having adult content doesn’t mean cheap humor. There is a fine line between pushing the boundary and pandering to the lowest common denominator. There are number of movies that do get adult humor right. Superbad, American Pie are among a few. Clearly Grand Masti is attempting to imitate the success of these movies, but instead of borrowing good ideas from them people behind Grand Masti decided to just stick with ‘haha, look boobies’ jokes. And it seems to be a winning combination for some horrible reason.  

Grand Masti is an attempt to make a Bollywood-version college movie that glorifies debauchery, lack of respect for women, and the boys-will-be-boys culture. It’s an insult to women and some male allies in India and world over who resist this commercialization of sexual fetish by an increasingly capitalist Bollywood, which is why the amount of money this movie has made scares me. The movie is profitable by Bollywood standards, which means that millions of Indians men (I hope it’s only men, because no respectable woman should stand for such objectification) went out and watched it. One can only feel a sense of impending doom as the realization hits that the 3^rd movie in this installment will bring more of the same.

A very special thanks to Ammad Wajahat.