An official adaptation of the Hindi film Angoor which was in turn adapted from William Shakespeare’s play The Comedy Of Errors, Cirkus follows the story of two pair of twins who are exchanged at birth, only to be found at the same place leading to confusion. The story had all the ingredients to be a rib-tickling comedy. But the screenplay standing at 140 minutes is such a hot mess that I do not know where to begin. It is so bad that despite me popping a paracetamol before the film, I still had a splitting headache.

The drama opens with one of the character talking about Science. Really now? The topic of Science in a Rohit Shetty film that prompts us to leave our brains at home? After a innocuous start where the two pair of twins are exchanged, the story is divided at two separate venues – Bangalore and Ooty where the two pair of twins grow up after being adopted by two sets of parents. The drama just doesn’t take off at all and even if I were to treat it like a timepass affair, it still was falling behind in that aspect. The gags were unfunny, the proceedings were uninspiring and all this while I was forcing myself to continue with the film in hope that things would improve.

If I had to choose between the two halves, the first half is better than the second. Yes, overall neither work but the first half is bearable with short scenes that do not overstay their welcome. The gags consistently do not land and much is to do with the unfunny and irritating lines penned by co-dialogues writer Farhad Samji(something that I will get to in my next section). I was wondering on how the structure of the screenplay was approved in the first place. Earlier too we have seen films based on confusion and chaos like Hungama or even Rohit Shetty’s All The Best. These films atleast did have a structure to them and wern’t as scattered as this! Also, some of the proceedings are borrowed from each of Rohit Shetty’s previous films too like All The Best or Golmaal. Talk about “adapting” situations from the previous films too!

But it is the second half that is like a mercenary, tactfully finding my brain cells and successfully gunning them down. The writing took ‘slap’stick comedy to a whole new level with people slapping each other while shouting at one another at the top of their voices, all packaged to make you laugh and smile. You on the other hand are slowly sinking in your seat, face palming and tearing whatever little hair you have after the first hour. It was so bad and so irritating that I juat wanted to put a bullet through my head to end my misery. And for my trademark line – I wonder who approved this pile of dogsh*t.

It was torture, pure torture, probably the work of a sadist. There was zero conflict in the screenplay that did result in the final act which was inept and ridiculously bad. Why was the experiment conducted in the first place? What ‘gyaan’ are you giving the audience? Why are the audience still watching the film? I mean even a school skit would be better than this pile of sh*t. And to top it, they did link the Golmaal universe here as well where the protagonists of Golmaal who as kids visit the orphanage. Again why? If in the modern day Golmaal universe, Ranveer and Varun Sharma would be the age of Amitabh Bachchan and so the creative decision just made zero sense, just like the film. Overall, the screenplay is just so bad that the word ‘bad’ would actually be ‘good’. Did that make sense? Oh well, you know what the film has done to me now!