As the title suggests, Gang of Ghosts (2014) contains many, many ghosts. They're not really a gang, though; it's really more like a retirement community of ghosts. The movie opens with an animated song and dance number featuring wacky dancing skeletons (the best kind of skeleton) singing about the plight of the modern ghost in a world in which old, hauntable buildings are being knocked down at a steady pace. And yes, this is a movie about the housing problems of the dead. It's kind of like Bollywood Beetlejuice, except different in nearly every conceivable way.
Aditya (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) is an ad director, scouting for a location for his next commercial. He finds the perfect place in the Royal Mansion, a ruined building gently decaying in Mumbai. The mansion has only escaped being torn down because there is an ongoing legal dispute about exactly who owns it; this will be important later. Due to a series of contrived events, Aditya winds up staying the night in the mansion, where he meets Raju Writer (Sharman Joshi), an aspiring but so far failed script writer who finally convinces Aditya to listen to his movie pitch, and that is the framing story.
As Raju explains, the Royal Mansion once belonged to Gendemal Hemraj (Anupam Kher), a local nobleman who rose to prominence by selling his mill to the British; the mill workers are so poorly treated that they finally burn the mill down, with Gendemal inside. Post-death, he returns home and commences haunting the Royal Mansion, where is is quickly joined by the ghost of British officer Ramsey (J. Brandon Hill.)
As the years pass, more and more homeless ghosts movie into the mansion. The ghost of fading Bollywood starlet Manoranjana Kumari (Mahi Gill) is followed by Bengali apothecary Bhootnath Bhaduri, murdered nobleman-turned-chef Akbar Kwaja Khan (Rajpal Yadav), Brigadier Hoshiar Singh, deceased (Yashpal Sharma), burned out rock star Robin Hooda (Vijay Varma), star-crossed lover Tina (Meera Chopra), and Atmaram (Asrani), a poor taxi driver run over by a rich man whom the movie pointedly does not name. They are an odd bunch, drawn not only from different times and places, but from different film genres.
And for a while, the ghosts just sort of . . . hang out. Bhootnath and Akbar and Singh all compete for Manoranjana's affections. Tina has a crush on Robin. Atmaram drives them places. There's really nothing overtly supernatural going on, apart from a brief bit of haunting to drive away an intrusive film company. And then, disaster strikes. The court case about the Royal mansion's ownership is resolved, and the building is sold to greedy (and generally terrible) developer Bhuteria (Rajesh Khattar), who plans to knock the place down and build a shopping mall. The desperate ghosts turn to SpookBook (really!) to look for help, and wind up with Babu Hatkaka (Jackie Shroff), the one armed ghost of a gang lord and representative of yet another genre.
While he's a freelance ghost hired by some desperate spooks to chase away some pesky humans, Babu isn't very much like Beetlejuice at all; he's a gangster in death as he was in life, and plan for dealing with Bhuteria is just to shoot the guy. The others talk him out of it, and together they come up with a more . . . creative solution.
This is possibly the least overtly supernatural movie about ghosts I have ever seen - it's about as Gothic as a baby duck on a sunny day. The ghosts eat, they sleep, they buy things at the store, they go to the beach. It's almost as if the whole ghost thing is an excuse to turn a strange assortment of characters into a little community, then threaten that community with encroaching gentrification. Still not much of a gang, though.
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