Toaster Review: A Ridiculous Premise And An Equally Ridiculous Execution
Rating: 1/5 Suyog Zore
While over-the-top slapstick comedies lean on physical humor for immediate laughs, 'comedies of errors' derive their charm from the delightful chaos of a minor misunderstanding snowballing into a full-scale disaster. We usually watch these for the cringey joy of seeing a plan go south. However, director Vivek Daschaudary’s Toaster achieves a different flavor of "embarrassment" entirely: the kind felt by the Netflix subscriber for wasting 125 minutes of perfectly good high-speed data and their precious time.
The story centers on Ramakant (Rajkummar Rao), a man whose stinginess is less of a trait and more of a full-time hobby. He is the ultimate makhichoos, a miser so extreme he’d spend an hour on a customer care call just to argue over a six-rupee discrepancy. The couple lives in a rented flat owned by the saintly Mrs. D’Souza (Seema Pahwa), whom Ramakant shamelessly manipulates into lowering his rent by a few hundred rupees at every turn. Meanwhile, his wife Shilpa (Sanya Malhotra)—a woman fueled by a steady diet of televised crime dramas—is fed up with their rental life in a quiet colony of senior citizens and is desperate to buy a house of their own.
The movie starts with a straightforward premise: Ramakant and Shilpa attend a wedding for which Shilpa insists on buying a high-end toaster worth 5,000 rupees. Despite his reservations about the price, Ramakant yields to her request. However, when the nuptials are abruptly canceled, he becomes obsessed with reclaiming the gift to secure a refund. What starts as a petty errand quickly spirals into a chaotic mess of murder and mayhem. The stakes get dangerously high when Mrs. D’Souza’s drug-addicted son accidentally records a compromising video of a powerful politician, pulling Ramakant into a world of blackmail and crime. How a simple kitchen appliance ends up at the center of this dangerous ruckus—and how Ramakant’s greed almost destroys his life—is the core of this bizarre Netflix tale.
Despite this setup, the film quickly loses its way as the cleverness of the plot is buried under poor execution. Where there should be a sharp, satirical edge to the writing, there is instead only a tiring series of gags that land with the heavy thud of a frozen bagel. The film desperately wants to be a "smart" dark comedy, but it settles for exhausting the audience with sequences that prioritize noise over wit. A prime example of this is the repetitive and increasingly painful series of tricks Ramakant employs to retrieve his "precious" toaster from an orphanage. In one particularly agonizing scene, he concocts a transparent lie about a manufacturing defect—nearly breaking into the orphanage to get back his toaster. Instead of these moments building a sense of hilarious desperation, they feel stretched and poorly timed. We see him hovering around the orphanage like a low-budget spy, engaging in "physical comedy" that involves more awkward silence than actual humor.
Running parallel to Ramakant’s domestic chaos is a much darker, though equally bungled, subplot involving a high-stakes political scandal. Mrs. D’Souza’s drug-addicted son has managed to hide a memory card containing incriminating footage of a powerful politician that people working under him are now desperate to recover at any cost. As one might expect from this genre, these two disparate tracks—the search for a toaster and the hunt for political leverage—inevitably collide. The result is a messy, tangled web of misunderstandings where the "makhichoos" miser and the ruthless politician find themselves at cross-purposes. While this intersection is designed to create a crescendo of comedic tension, it ultimately feels more like a forced collision, adding more layers of confusion to an already shaky narrative.
The film consistently misses the mark where it should have delivered sharp, clever satire. Instead of a witty script that pokes fun at human obsession, we are given an exhausting series of gags that feel heavy and uninspired. Every time the story attempts to build comedic momentum, the jokes fall flat, landing with a dull thud rather than the spark you would expect from such a talented cast. It isn't just the logic of the scenes that fails; the dialogues are equally grating. Every banter-filled exchange and attempted one-liner lands with a cringe rather than a laugh. The humor tries so hard to be clever that it loses its soul, leaving us feeling more awkward than entertained.
Rajkummar Rao, typically a master of the "heightened yet grounded" comedic style, struggles to find his footing here. He attempts to strike that familiar balance between over-the-top eccentricity and relatable naturalism, but the performance ultimately feels forced and uncharacteristically "on the nose." Without a solid script to anchor him, his portrayal of the extreme miser comes across more as a caricature than a living, breathing character.
Similarly, Sanya Malhotra puts in a spirited effort to elevate the material, yet her role remains thin and one-dimensional. Despite her undeniable talent, she is trapped in a character arc that feels more like a sketch-comedy trope than a fully realized person. While Archana Puran Singh provides a brief spark of interest with a surprisingly nuanced performance that catches the audience off guard, her presence isn't enough to counteract the surrounding chaos. One strong supporting turn simply cannot salvage a narrative that is so deeply mired in artificiality and cringe-inducing dialogue.
Director Vivek Daschaudary proves that even an interesting concept like this needs a strong script to actually work. Despite having a talented cast, the film feels remarkably uninspired and flat. 'Toaster' isn’t just a disappointment; it’s a poorly executed attempt at comedy that fails to deliver any real substance or entertainment.
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Sanya Malhotra, Archana Puran Singh,
Writers: Parveez Shaikh, Akshat Ghildial, Anagh Mukherjee
Director: Vivek Daschaudary
Comments
Post a Comment