The silliness Detective Sherdil packs in the guise of humour not only trivialises a likeable star but squanders its ensemble cast into one-note distractions, notes Sukanya Verma.
Some filmmakers are akin to the pompous hare of the classic Aesop's fable fame. Like him, they are consumed by overconfidence, ignore their gifts and let hubris have its way.
The Ravi Chhabriya-directed Detective Sherdil, co-written by him and Producer Ali Abbas Zaffar, seem so self-satisfied about roping in Diljit Dosanjh as the titular sleuth, they forget to work on anything else.
Falling back on the done-to-death down Agatha Christie template of a rich man's mansion, one murdered dude and multiple suspects opening the way for a maverick detective to solve the mystery, Detective Sherdil's bag of twists and tricks have little intrigue and zero cunning.
But the silliness it packs in the guise of humour not only trivialises a likeable star but squanders its ensemble cast into one-note distractions.
Its stale and dull suspense, set in Budapest for visual novelty, kickstarts when a moneybags (Boman Irani) is brutally bumped off, setting the stage for Sherdil -- a blend of Sherlock-meets-Karamchand-meets Byomkesh, strictly by his own standards -- to crack the case concerning muddled inheritance and greedy claimants.
Armed with his associates, which includes Diana Penty as the slick-haired sneering specialist, Sherdil smugly mouths inanities like, 'I find a problem in every solution,' hijacks every moment of an already annoying Dhan Te Nan brand of background music by playing the harmonica and shoves forced idiosyncrasy down our throats.
Apart from its fancy European manor interiors and mention of euros, there's little context to its foreign shores setting except, perhaps, production expediency.
Instead, the focus of its little less than two hours running time is on its sprawling contenders for guilty as charged.
Ranging from the deceased's hoity toity wife (Ratna Pathak Shah), deaf and mute altruistic daughter (Banita Sandhu), vain son (Sumeet Vyas), his gori better half (Sarah Barlondo), a new age earth guru in Roman style cassocks (Chunky Pandey), a snoopy house help (Kashmira Irani Saxena), a disabled accountant (Arjun Tanwar) and a heavily tattooed hitman (Mikhail), Detective Sherdil lays out its framework of flashbacks for the sake of guessing game.
Between the onslaughts of smirks and scowls, phony phirang accents and scenario staggeringly bereft of depth, drama and delicious deceit, one has to settle for Diljit Dosanjh's grating schoolboy brat passed off for quirky detective, Ratna Pathak Shah doing yet another version of eye rolling, super rich snob Sumeet Vyas mumbling gems like 'think of the devil and the detective arrives' and Chunky Pandey, in all seriousness, giving tight hugs to an unsuspecting tree while a killer lurks around.
There's less 'who' and more 'who cares' to this whodunit.
Detective Sherdil streams on ZEE5.
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