Milap Zaveri's filmography is a filmography of regression. You enter the theater as a human and emerge crawling like an ape. From his directorial debut, Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai, to his new sex comedy, Mastiii 4, Zaveri has managed to bore the audience with one dud after another. One is almost shocked when one comes out of a new Milap Zaveri film, not because of the detritus that the writer-director splashes on the screen (in Mastiii 4, even the characters' hands and faces get covered in shit — no one is safe in a Zaveri Movie), but because of the realization that the latest directorial effort is actually worse than whatever Zaveri made last time. In that respect, Zaveri manages to do the impossible: he doesn't lower your expectations; he buries it and pees on it. Here is — apologies for using this word — a "filmmaker" who refuses to learn from his mistakes. He's very much like Amar Saxena (Riteish Deshmukh), Meet Mehta (Vivek Oberoi), and Prem Chawla (Aftab Shivdasani) — the Masti trio who, at the end of every Masti film, promise to love their wife, only to break that promise (and change their wives) in the next Masti installment. No wonder, then, in Mastiii 4, they even stop pretending to have been changed. They make fake promises to their wives and then tease the fifth sequel. The message? Men will be men.
These men are horny fools who are fed up with their spouses. In one of the scenes in the film, Menka (Nargis Fakhri) pretends to be on her phone at a café and screams, "Aapka husband yahan apni girlfriend ke saath baitha hai," or something like that. Immediately, all the men get up from their seats and run from the café. "All men are dogs," Zaveri says, but he also doesn't admonish these men for their behavior. Mastiii 4 is the cinematic equivalent of a person who poses as a feminist just to get laid. Amar, Meet, and Prem happen upon a wedding, recognize their mistake, and ultimately make a U-turn, winking at the audience as they tease yet another sex-comedy escapade (beneath all the childish gags, Mastiii 4 is a movie made by a cynic who thinks men and women will never really change). Zaveri has constantly maintained that Mastiii 4 doesn't hate women, that it celebrates women. The director's idea of "celebrating women" is to reduce them to dumb, possessive archetypes who can't tell there's a person under a bedsheet or recognize their own husbands through terrible makeup. Bindiya (Elnaaz Norouzi), Aanchal (Shreya Sharma), and Geeta (Ruhi Singh) are plucked out of a lame husband-wife joke and planted into an equally lame husband-wife relationship. They are the kind of partners male standup comics joke about on stage. Those men don't have a good sense of humor, but the jokes work for people who, too, don't have a good sense of humor.
Zaveri clearly enjoys those gags, which explains why Mastiii 4 resembles a private chat room run by a group of sexually frustrated married men. To make matters worse, one has to sit through Zaveri Dialogues that sound like wet dreams of an amateur poet (sample: Patni ke saamne blood donor aur peeth piche Vicky Donor). Zaveri's writing has a decidedly adolescent quality, and as a director, he uses imagery to amplify those so-called "gems." A Milap Zaveri Movie, then, is also a Milap Zaveri Fan who constantly says, "Waah Waah" after every line. The only time one feels like saying, "waah waah" during Mastiii 4 is when a patient explains his complicated family relationships to Prem. A better filmmaker would have done something with this moment—the man's complex problem deserves a whole movie of its own. Zaveri, though, simply sees it as an opportunity to show how his brain functions, which isn't much, since there is nothing remarkable inside that head. Zaveri is no Farrelly brother; he's simply a schoolkid giggling at tame sexual suggestions.
Final Score- [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times