The ApunKaChoice movie review of Chillar Party. All the Pamela Andersons and Celina Jaitleys who strip to stop cruelty to animals and whose steamy PETA ads are like magnets to many eyeballs, now have competition from a very unexpected quarter: a bunch of feisty kids in a middle-class housing society in Mumbai.
A tribe of tykes ride on bicycles, congregate in dusty sheds, and steamroll the enemy team on the cricket field. The gang is called Chillar Party and they have a new task at hand: a poor waif Fatka (Irrfan Khan) and his inseparable other half Bheedu (a dog).
Fatka enters the housing society and takes up petty car-washing jobs and comes under the crosshairs of the Chillar Party before securing his place in it by proving his pluck on the cricket field.
All is well in the first half and the audiences are laughing silly at the juvenile gags. But then the film moves onto a somewhat serious terrain as a dog-despising politician vows to clean the city of stray dogs, which means Bheedu, now an inseparable part of the Chillar Party, could soon be cooped and done away with.
That’s when the spunky kids decide to take the cudgels for the canine and hoist a banner of rebellion against the cynic and corrupt politician. Their way of protest -- stripping to their undies in public. And they do grab the eyeballs.
Chillar Party is a sweet little film that starts off very well but steers into a bumpy zone in the second half as the standoff between the kids and the politico begins. Of course, there’s a message or two squeezed in here by the director duo Vikas Bahl and Nitesh Tiwari.
The kids are all right, but it’s Fatka, Encyclopaedia and Mottu who stand out. The movie packs in funny moments aplenty, most notable being the ones where the kids begin to imitate Fatka’s style.
All in all, a film with a heart and ample humour. Quite canny for Salman Khan to back it as a producer - his first one and surely worth a watch.
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