Fruit & Nut Movie Reviews

By rights, ‘Fruit and Nut’ should have been Comedy Central. After all, Boman can be a complete fruitcake, and a bigger nut than Cyrus is hard to find. If these two are placed in a mixer and swirled around by Kunal, who’s no slouch himself at making us laugh, we should have be rolling around the aisles, right? Sadly, very sadly, we don’t. Ex-maharaja Harry Holkar (Boman Irani playing flagrantly insane in an atrociously fake wig) wants his old beloved Mumbai back.

First the Portuguese screwed Mumbai over; then the Brits did; now Himesh does. So says Boman Irani’s brilliant Holkar, the lewd pun of his surname, like all puns, being intended of course. Holkar was once Maharaja of Mumbai. He’s now Irani’s own version of Austin Powers’ Dr Evil. He wants to blow up drain-pipes below Mantralaya, Maharashtra’s seat of power, where the Congress-NCP will host their successive champagne party soon.

How many times can you repeat the same joke before it stops being funny? That's a question Kunal Vijayakar ought to have asked himself before unleashing on us his occasionally-funny-but-largely-silly directorial effort, Fruit & Nut. Cyrus Broacha inadvertently sits on Mahesh Manjrekar's fractured leg while visiting him in hospital. Funny? Yes. But repeated four times in the span of one minute, you're no longer laughing.

FRUIT & NUT, directed by Kunal Vijaykar, is one of those films that succeed in making you giggle intermittently. But how one wishes the film had a strong story in the first place. This one is a senseless comedy and the sad part is, the absurdities here are not too amusing. FRUIT & NUT is about Jolly Maker, who is a simple, hard working middle class struggling bachelor in search of love, money, friends and success.

Neither fruity nor nutty, this film ends up as a total squish. After an unfruitful watch, you feel completely let down since the film boasts of a star cast that includes most of the contemporary funsters of the entertainment industry. Kunal Vijaykar's humour has been creating quite a few irreverent and extremely watchable in laughs in the weekly news that wasn't show anchored by Cyrus Broacha. So you naturally go in expecting some modern gigs

If there is still an audience out there for MTV style, Bakra humour and chaotic comedy, then Fruit & Nut would be aimed at them. Cyrus Broacha plays Jolly Maker, a middle-class loser who gets caught up in a plot to save Mantralaya from being bombed by corrupt Khandhar Zhala (Mahesh Manjrekar) and insane Maharaja Harry Holkar (Boman Irani). All because Jolly wants to rescue the woman he loves, Monica (Diya Mirza). There are RAW agents, geriatric hit-men

Fruit and Nut has Cyrus Brocha play dumb and Kunal Vijaykar direct dumber drama to deafening outcome with no cinematic vision. From the onset the makers are clear about churning a senseless slapstick with no regards to sanity in script. Unfortunately this absurdity is not half as amusing as they might have anticipated. Mona (Dia Mirza) is kidnapped by a lunatic caricature Harry Holkar (Boman Irani) who believes he is the Maharaja of Mumbai and wants to claim back the city

Fruit and Nut, the directorial debut of actor Kunal Vijaykar, is about a bumbling, accident-prone bachelor named Jolly Maker, played by Cyrus Brocha, who becomes embroiled in a nefarious plot to blow up Mumbai, orchestrated by a loony Maharaja named Harry Holkar, played by Boman Irani. Vijaykar is aiming for no-holds-barred madcap hilarity but as I watched Fruit and Nut, all I could think was: how did so many talented and ferociously funny men come up with comedy as limp as this.

Offbeat, I am afraid, is a rather tricky term. In the domain of low-budget cinema, its definition ranges from meaningful, ironic and abstract to silly, obnoxious and uninspiring. But clever filmmaking, as witnessed through films like Khosla Ka Ghosla and Bheja Fry, isn't restricted to a mere budget. Either the script has it or it doesn't. In the case of director Kunal Vijaykar's debut comedy, Fruit and Nut, it doesn't.

Fruit & Nut is an attempted comedy, which ends up being a very forced and tiresome movie. It has a very amateurish story and is stuffed full of clever lines and forced gags which finally add up to a grand nothing. It’s the kind of situational silliness that may perhaps work on music television, but falls hopelessly flat in a feature film.The story is just too embarrassing and stupid to detail. It involves a certain Maharaja Harry Holkar of Bombay (Boman Irani)