Jackie Shroff, talk to your agent.

Writing one of the internet's finest gorilla-themed Bollywood review blogs is fun, but it does come with responsibilities.  When a new gorilla-themed Bollywood movie comes out, I pretty much have to watch and review it, and today it is my sad duty to review Hello Charlie (2021).  

 

The Charlie in question is Chirag Rastogi (Aadar Jain), an enthusiastic young man who's left his home village and come to the big city in order to earn money to pay off his late father's debts.  Charlie promises his truck driver uncle Karsan (Darshan Jariwala) that he'll find a job and earn his keep.  The problem is that Charlie is a lunkhead, a jabroni, a Simon-pure labrick if ever there was one.  He makes stupid mistakes and is fired from a series of jobs, culminating in a pizza delivery gone wrong which ends with the pizza shop in flames, a car crash, and the escape of the most wanted man in India.

The wanted man in question is M. D, Makwana (Jackie Shroff), a rich jerk who has defrauded the Indian people in what seems to be a Bernie Madoffesque fashion.  (The movie doesn't really care about the specifics.  He's bad, okay?)  Makwana calls his gun-toting model girlfriend Mona (Elnaaz Norouzi) for help in getting out of the country.  Mona comes up with the uniquely terrible plan of disguising Makwana as a gorilla, and hiring a truck to take him to the coast.  And of course the truck she hires is driven by Charlie, since his uncle is out of town.

 

Meanwhile, a plane carrying an actual gorilla has crashed in the nearby jungle.  The pilots are fine, but the gorilla has escaped, and forest ranger Solee Topi (Rajpal Yadav), who is basically Dogberry with a dart gun, is on the case.  Will there be mistaken identity hijinks?  There will, since this is a universe in which people can't tell the difference between a gorilla and a guy in a gorilla suit.  (Though with the budget this movie is working with, it's really the difference between a guy in a gorilla suit and a guiy in a cheaper gorilla suit.)

 

I could go on.  Charlie meets a nasty circus owner (Girish Kulkarni) and a very nice circus dancer (Shlokka Pandit).  It's a broad farce, and ridiculous things happen.

 

Hello Charlie was actually better than I expected; maybe an eighth of the jokes actually land, and the movie mercifully steers clear of "humor" about overly amorous apes.  A lot of contemporary Indian farce draws its humor from sex and other bodily functions, but this is a movie you could watch with your kids.

However, being better than expected doesn't mean that it's good.  It's a dumb movie.  It's probably safe to skip this one unless you have specific gorilla related obligations.