Hello Charlie review: This mindless comedy starring Aadar Jain is outdated and unfunny

In Parag Saraswat's mindless comedy Hello Charlie, a simpleton, the good-for-nothing Chirag Rastogi aka Charlie (Aadar Jain), has just landed in Mumbai in search of a job so that he can pay off his father's debts. Meanwhile, billionaire fraudster MD Makwana (Jackie Shroff) is trying to flee the country. His girlfriend, played by Elnaaz Norouzi, comes up with a plan to disguise him as a gorilla, no less, and transport him to Diu, from where he will leave the country for good.

Charlie's uncle, who runs a transport business, asks Charlie to take care of his truck. Instead, Charlie steals the truck and decides to accept transport orders on his own to earn a few extra bucks. And the first order he gets is to deliver Makwana in a gorilla suit.

From here on, the adventure of the two unlikely buddies begins. There is a parallel subplot about a real gorilla which has escaped from a crashed plane and whom forest officer Rajpal Yadav has been tasked with recapturing.

The screenplay by Saraswat, based on this wafer-thin plot, is predictable and full of conventions. But that is not the real problem, because, let's admit it, we were not hoping to see something grand and original. All we wanted to watch was a brainless comedy that would make us laugh our hearts out.

But this is where the film falters. To put it bluntly, Hello Charlie is unfunny and outdated. The film hardly ever makes you laugh. None of the jokes land. Abhishek Khairkar’s lame dialogues are also to blame for this. The dialogues turn even scenes with some comic potential into lifeless, boring scenes.

Acting-wise also, the film does not make any impact. Jain, who features in almost every scene, fails to impress the viewer. The same goes for most of the cast, including veteran Jackie Shroff, who, except for a few minutes in the beginning and at the end, spends his time in a gorilla costume which acts like his Iron Man suit.

Norouzi does a decent job while Bharat Ganeshpure, who appears in only about three scenes as a perpetually inebriated veterinarian, makes the most impact. He alone provides much-needed respite from the rest of the dull comedy.

When a 100-minute film starts feeling like a never-ending circus, you know how terrible the writing must have been.

Hello Charlie is now available on Amazon Prime Video.