When Abhishek Sharma had made his directorial debut with the laugh riot Tere Bin Laden in 2010, it got a warm welcome from all quarters, but when the sequel was announced, it led to skepticism as Osama Bin Laden is no more and everyone wondered what the makers would come up with this time.

Abhishek Sharma's attempt to carry forward the successful 2010 film is partially successful and partially not. The first film surprised the audience with its edgy sense of humour and the whole madness around most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden.

Director Abhishek Sharma still hasn't gotten over Laden. But he isn't second time lucky, for Tere Bin Laden: Dead or Alive is a classic example of stretching a familiar joke too long. The sequel to satire, which mocks US, is less clever. It takes the comedy of errors route, only this time around it fails to tickle the funny bone.

Satirising terrorism is as tricky as making molar surgery mirthful. Abhishek Sharma did it once in Tere Bin Laden, then fall flat on his face with a raunchy sexed-up version of Basu Chatterjee's Shaukeen. So Sharma is back doing what he thinks he is best at: Generating titters out of terrorism.

A follow up to the hugely successful Tere Bin Laden, the 2016 release has Manish Paul playing the role of an aspiring film maker who's caught in an odd ball situation involving none other than fake Osama Bin Laden played by Pradhuman Singh. This time around the story revolves around a CIA agent (Sikander Kher) who needs to shoot the death sequence of Osama to show his American President.

Sharma Junior (Manish Paul) comes from the 'Halwai Khandaan' and is expected to join his family business of making Jalebis by his family. The only problem is, his heart breathes Bollywood. He aspires to be a big ticket director and decides to take off to Mumbai to fulfill his dream.

It has been six long years since Tere Bin Laden mopped up a neat pile from the box office. Why, then, does the sequel to the whacky comedy feel like such a rush job? A quick verdict: Tere Bin Laden: Dead or Alive is more dead-on-arrival than alive. If not an outright washout, this sloppy send-up is far too limp to run the distance. Like the 2010 sleeper hit, the follow-up is the handiwork of writer-director Abhishek Sharma.

When Abhishek Sharma's Tere Bin Laden came out in 2010, its wacky premise and fizzy humour, involving an Osama Bin Laden doppelganger and a Pakistani reporter desperate to migrate to United States of America, made me guffaw. It was one of my favourite films that year. What it lacked in sophistication, it made up in effrontery. A year later, the infamous Al Qaeda founder was killed in a US army operation and Sharma ostensibly thought, 'here's an opportunity for a sequel.'

After quitting his thriving halwai business in Delhi's Chandni Chowk to make a career in films, Sharma (Manish Paul) strikes gold with his directorial debut that features Paddhi (Pradhuman Singh), who is a spitting image of Osama Bin Laden. Osama's untimely death shatters their plans of a sequel. Meanwhile, both FBI and a Mujhahideen organisation are hunting for the doppelganger.

When Abhishek Sharma was given the 'Baawra ho gaya hai ke' award for his film The Shaukeens at the Golden Kela Awards 2015, he looked introspective despite a laughing exterior. In his acceptance speech, he promised to make 'meaningful' films without getting into the rat race for stars. So has he made a better film this time around, with the sequel of his hilarious 2010 fare Tere Bin Laden?

It's Osama time again, folks. Six years back, the film was called, simply, 'Tere Bin Laden'. Now it's got a tagline attached: 'Dead Or Alive', so our Bin Laden lookalike Pradhuman aka Paddy Singh is made to work doubly hard, because he is of great use in either state, depending upon whether you are the first Black President of the Yewnited States looking to be re-elected, or a bearded terrorist keen to show the world that his beloved leader is still around.

When you have an iconic film to live up to, it is always going to be an uphill task when you come up with its sequel. TERE BIN LADEN is one of the best films to have been made in the last ten years. Even though the theatrical trailer of TERE BIN LADEN DEAD OR ALIVE boasted of a lot of promise, the movie is a half baked entertainer that makes you chuckle at quite a few occasions but it doesn't deliver a full throated laughter.