Mere presence of Naseeruddin Shah, Kay Kay Menon, Atul Kulkarni and Ravi Kishan in a film had raised expectations of high tension entertainment, and it does, albeit to some extent in Chaalis Chauraasi.
Chaalis Chaurasi has a talented cast of this foursome, who by their sheer brilliance save the otherwise sloppy script.
Albert (Kay Kay Menon) is a car thief, Bobby (Atul Kulkarni) is a bar singer, Shakti (Ravi Kishan) is a drug peddler and Pankaj (Naseeruddin Shah) a former English professor fallen on hard times happen to come together.
Pankaj aka Sir comes up with a plan to rob Rs. 20 crores. He knows the place, and has some information about two men guarding it. They decide pull off a robbery in the guise of police.
To present yourselves as cops, you have to act like one and even think like a cop.
To a certain extent they succeed, but trouble brews when they come across real cops. The real cops are out to raid a hotel some where in the outskirts of the city. A wanted criminal is hiding somewhere in the hotel. The back up vehicle could not reach there. So the real cop orders this foursome to be a part of the raid and capture the wanted criminal. This operation could invoke firing from the other side, but are this foursome ready for it?
One thing stands out is that each of the character’s profile is shown in flash backs off and on. This interesting concept is a nice story which when proceeds, provides funny twists and twirls in the plot.
The raid is carried out and almost all the real cops get decimated. So do the henchmen of the wanted criminal. Now it is just the single cop, a wanted criminal and this foursome. Things get messed up here and it is fun too, especially in the second half of the film.
The characters in Chaalis Chauraasi are well defined and the weirdest one is that of Albert played by Kay Kay Menon. This Albers is a car thief who steals and destroys the Fiat cars in Mumbai. Why? Because he wants to be the only owner of a Fiat car in the city.
Naseeruddin Shah is top notch as a bumbling cop, Ravi Kishan looks typical as a drug peddler, and Atul Kulkarni as the wanna be singer also dreams of starting a high class escort agency.
Chaalis Chauraasi is the name of this film, as this foursome carry out their task of robbery in this police van having license number as 4084.
Cast of Chaalis Chauraasi:
Naseeruddin Shah – Pankaj Suri – Sir
Atul Kulkarni – Bhaskar Sardesai – Bobby
Kay Kay Menon – Albert Pinto – Pinto
Ravi Kissen – Shakti Chinappa – Shakti
Shweta Bhardwaj
Rajesh Sharma
Zakir Hussain
Manoj Pahwa
Reetu Jain
Arbaaz Ali Khan
Yuri Suri
Credits & Crew of Chaalis Chauraasi:
Banner – MAASK Entertainment Pvt Ltd, Filament Glo India Pvt. Ltd
Producers – Anuya Mhaiskar, Sachin Awasthee, Uday Shetty
Story Writers – Vinay, Yash
Background Music – Sanjay Chowdhury
Music Director – Lalit Pandit, Vishal Rajan
Director – Hriday Shetty
Lyricist – Sandeep Srivastava, Hasan Jahangir, Vishal Rajan
Editor – Bunty Nagi
Cinematography – Najeeb Khan
Action – Abbas Ali Moghul
Screenplay / Dialogues – Vinay, Yash
Sound – Alok De, Kunal Sharma
Choreographer – Piyush Panchal
Costume Designer – Shefalina
Chaalis Chauraasi – movie review