Rajpal Yadav makes his debut as a
director with social satire Ata Pata
Laapata. The film starts off as a comedy, but turns into a social drama, addressing social and political issues like corruption, land mafia, ministers and their vote banks.
As the film preaches satya and ahimsa, you wonder what its relevance to the story is! Yadav very ambitiously tries to rope in multiple issues that are plaguing our society today, but unfortunately the script fails to create its need!
Manav Chaturvedi BA LLB, (Rajpal Yadav) finds his house missing! He wonders how it can just vanish into thin air! He files a complaint with the police, but everyone suspects Manav to be the culprit. Popular perception is that he abolished his own house to claim the insurance money worth Rs 10 Crore.
Manav denies it and soon, the weird robbery case catches media’s eye. Manav’s tragedy becomes front page news with TV channels giving live coverage of his day-to-day happenings.
Politicians and cops are forced to acknowledge Manav’s complaint due to media pressure. They even file an FIR. Will everybody find out who stole Manav’s house, or is Manav lying, as suspected by many?
The puzzling ‘who-done-it’ story fails to unravel for the longest time. The investigation process in this case should be ideally interesting, but it ends up being so repetitive that after a while you lose interest in knowing the truth.
Rajpal Yadav also plays the *sutradhar* of the film. Being the narrator, he sings ‘Ata Pata Laapata’ every two minutes, in order to push the story ahead, which does not happen. The film looks like a one-line story being stretched unnecessarily just to consume the audience’s time. Street plays, nautanki, songs, dialogues, everything in the movie addresses social and political issues, but everything lacks clarity.
Every petty issue looks like it’s been forcibly made to appear as an issue of national interest. The preachiness and repetition bores you to death. Guess the intention was to make a musical satire. Songs seem like fillers, which only add to the length of the movie, but nothing to the story. (Agencies)