One does not simply walk into Goa.

Bombay to Goa (2007) is a hard movie to classify. Is it a series of loosely connected comic sketches masquerading as a screwball ensemble comedy, is it an ensemble comedy which branches out into a series of comic sketches, or is it a butterfly dreaming it’s a man? It’s a very silly movie, in any case.
Our initial protagonist is Lal (Sunil Pal), an aspiring entrepreneur who just won 200,000 rupees in a stand up comedy contest. Lal dreams of building his own shopping mall, but 200,000 rupees really isn’t mall money. Instead, his brother-in-law, recently fired chauffeur Das (Vijay Raaz), suggests that they start a bus company running from Bombay to Goa; Das can drive, and knows a guy who can build them a custom bus, while Lal can run the business and round up customers.

After some hard selling, Lal rounds up a busload of wacky eccentrics. There are a lot of them (enough to fill a bus, in fact), including Abdul (Ahsaan Qureshi), a miller and sometime poet who has just eloped with his still burqa clad wife, and Anthony Gonsalves (Raju Shrivastav), a former hospital orderly, aspiring novelist, and occasional Amitabh Bachchan impersonator. (Anthony dresses and acts very much like 70’s Amitabh, but he only does the voice occasionally, and he’s really too short to properly evoke Big B. Medium B, maybe.) Each of these delightful eccentrics is introduced in a scene which establishes his or her individual quirks and subplot.

Once all these individual subplots have finally been established, they’re promptly abandoned. One of the passangers, a mysterious old man named Harley Davidson (Mac Mohan, who is second only to Bob Christo in the pantheon of 70s and 80’s villainous henchmen) is mortally wounded in a motorcycle accident. Before dying, Harley reveals his secret: twenty years ago, he hid a cache of stolen treasure in Goa, and since the people on the bus have all been so nice he’ll give them a hand drawn map and some vague directions, and suddenly the movie turns into It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, with the passengers breaking into small groups and scrambling through Goa in search of the treasure.

The characters in Bombay to Goa are drawn in very broad strokes; everyone has a single defining trait (”surly!” “bar girl!” “eunuch!” “needs to pee!”) which informs all their actions, and they don’t really change. This is not a movie about character development. Anthony is probably the most complex character here, since he’s both a writer and Amitabh Bachchan, and he’s not very complex. (The bus is practically a character in its own right; like the others, it serves mostly as a vehicle for cheesy jokes.)

This is not an ambitious movie; there’s no attempt at character development, the plot doesn’t even try to make sense, and the jokes are hit and miss, but that’s okay because if you don’t like a particular gag, another one will be along in thirty seconds. Bombay to Goa is exactly as good as it wants to be.