IBTimes India Rating: 2
Want to avenge the humiliation your evil classmate caused you when he intentionally told the teacher how you were trying to hide underneath one of the back benches to avoid punishment for not having brought your textbook?
Recommend "Bangistan" to the trouble-maker who made you stand in the school hallway while a bunch of giggly juniors walked by killing your swag.
Karan Anshuman's directorial sits on an intelligent script, but the execution of it dampens the spark.
Riteish Deshmukh (Hafeez Bin Ali/ Ishwarchand Sharma) and Pulkit Samrat (Praveen Chaturvedi/ Allah Rakha Khan) play antithetical characters and yet their many conflicts seem feigned.
As suicide bombers, the two are sent on a mission to mess-up Bangistan's (the fictional land) leaders' plans to restore peace, at a conference in Krakow (Poland).
This is further stretching an already distorted narrative out of shape. The viewers would have understood the underlying message better, had the director presented his point in a less tedious manner.
The poker-faced humour one usually expects from a dark comedy (which this promises to be) is completely overshadowed by the tom foolery the film's central characters indulge in. The scope for laughs is immense and yet the script writers settle with only a few mediocre gags.
Deshmukh, who is mostly under-utilised in other films, manages to keep the film together, but the fairly new face needs some coaching. Hamming his way through most of the film, Pulkit needs to up his game.
In a nutshell, "Bangistan" is the saved-up firecracker from previous year's Diwali celebrations -- damp and no-good.