Anees Bazmee's Pagalpanti, a madcap caper, follows in the footsteps of illustrious crowd-pleasers that, despite predictable wafer thin plots, score with the audience. This one, with old dependables Anil Kapoor, Arshad Warsi and Saurabh Shukla who can make you laugh with a mere goofy lift of their eyebrow, serve the comic cause well and there are scenes in the film when I found myself laughing despite the silliness of it all. It's all about the hell that breaks loose when Raj Kishore (John Abraham) walks into people's lives.

A madcap caper without a semblance of a cap on its obsession with inanity, Anees Bazmee's Pagalpanti comes up with a mixed bag of stale gags and unleashes unbridled buffoonery in an attempt to pass it all off as comedy. The sheer mindlessness that the pea-brained film mines in the hope of tickling your funny bone is more grating than uproarious. The jokes are silly, the humour is lame and the acting wildly erratic.

PAGALPANTI is the story of three unlucky men who wreak havoc in the underworld. Raj Kishore (John Abraham) is astrologically very unlucky. Wherever he goes, destruction follows. He joins Public Mercantile Bank in India and on his first day at job, it comes to light that Niraj Modi (Inaamulhaq) has run away from the country after stealing Rs. 32,000 crores from the bank.

Earlier this year, I began my Total Dhamaal review by lamenting how once 'leave your brains behind' served as a sorry excuse to tolerate inane comedies. Now it's an unabashed selling point. Flash forward few months later: Pagalpanti. It even throws in a song insisting Dimaag Mat Lagana.

Raj Kishore (John Abraham) is the epitome of bad luck. Everything he touches turns to dust. Two brothers Junky (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) who are his friends are also made bankrupt by him. The trio owe money to gangsters Raja saab (Saurabh Shukla) and his brother-in-law WiFi Bhai (Anil Kapoor).

As every other slapstick comedy, this one is also set in London, & I hereby formally request the UK government to stop providing subsidies to our directors. We can't handle more. Junky (just as the content of the film) played by Arshad Warsi and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) are brothers who are trapped with the bad luck of their best friend Raj Kishore (John Abraham).

Anees Bazmee has written a lot of memorable films in the '90s, mostly featuring Govinda and Anil Kapoor, and they were genuinely funny and entertaining, and even if the plot was implausible or even impossible to exist in real, the narrative was elevated by their infallible leading men.

Raj Kishore (John Abraham) is a panvati (out of luck) guy. Whatever he does turn into a disaster. Even his friends Junky (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) face the wrath of Raj's bad luck, which forces them to join Raj in a misadventure that ends up in Raj, Chandu and Junky ending up as employers of gangsters Raja (Saurabh Shukla) and Wifi (Anil Kapoor).

Pagalpanti (Madness) is what happens when Anees Bazmee gets a couple of good ideas in the middle of a creative drought, but does not quite know what to do with them. Bazmee is not someone who can be dismissed as a mindless, crude comic in the league of Sajid Khan. He is, after all, the director who served up Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar in top goofy form in Welcome (2007), and brought a degree of freshness to the stereotypical Bollywood representation of boisterous Punjabis in Singh Is Kinng (2008).

You know that Pagalpanti doesn't have much going for it when it resorts to patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundrel and the first destination of the second-rate filmmaker. The title promises a harum-scarum comedy and accordingly, Anees Bazmee's movie plunges headlong into the plot.

Pagalpanti, as the self-aware title says, was never supposed to be taken seriously. It belonged, and proudly so, to that Bollywood coinage -- mindless comedy. A genre in itself, it is colloquially described as 'leave your brains at home' movies. Now these films, peddling slapstick, can be fun too. Director Anees Bazmee's Welcome and Singh is Kinng being two such examples.

An out-of-luck youngster Raj Kishore (John Abraham) and his friends Junky (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) are hired by gangsters Raja (Saurabh Shukla) and WiFi Bhai (Anil Kapoor) in a bid to recover their damages. But this is just the recipe for disaster that brings in more destruction.