Masala meltdown with Dolby headache!

Masala meltdown with Dolby headache : My quick take on Ajith’s “Good Bad Ugly” (Netflix)

It’s far from being a good movie, and uglier than a bad one — this isn’t a film, it’s Sikandar ka baap gatecrashing a slow-motion wedding where logic wasn’t invited. Not sure what genre this belongs to — is it a thriller? A revenge drama? A spoof? A comedy in denial? It’s as if four writers started four different scripts and the editor said, “Yes.”

It’s marketed as a tribute to the stardom of Ajith Kumar. What it ends up being is a musical spoof — a mashup of all his movies, played on shuffle, in a disco bar run by a DJ who loves slo-mo shots and hates silence. Watching this is like getting punched with nostalgia while someone shouts in your ear for three hours straight.

Remember that Deewangi Deewangi song in Om Shanti Om? Replace the actors with villains, stretch it over 3 hours, and remove the charm — that’s your screenplay. Cameos enter and exit like mosquitoes at a summer wedding. The film moves from one villainous entry to another like a jobless PowerPoint presentation looping back to slide one.

The screenplay is a fireworks display of dance numbers, loud music, gravity-defying action, and dialogue written in CAPS LOCK. It’s a Bhojpuri opera dressed in Dolby Atmos. Every shot looks like it was directed by someone who just discovered the slo-mo button and lost all self-control.

Performances? Think of it as a hamming competition where everyone’s winning and the audience is losing. This was apparently inspired by a Korean drama — well, after watching this, I fully expect the K-drama creators to sue for defamation of storytelling.

And just when you thought KGF had overdone the gun size, and Animal turned it up to 11, this movie goes full video game boss level with multi-barrel turret guns, firing bullets, fireworks, and possibly plot holes.

Poor Bhidu Dada, Trisha, Simran, Prabhu — even their collective screen presence couldn’t save this shipwreck. They’re like airbags in a crash that’s already happened. The film aspires to be the “Baap of masala movies” but ends up a soggy masala papad — limp, over-oiled, and cracking under its own weight.

Final word? Save your brain. Watch Clint Eastwood’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly again .Eastwood made a classic. This made noise. At least that one had the decency to tell you who’s who and shoot straight. This one? It shoots blanks. Loudly.