Mr Joe B Carvalho, directed by first-timer Samir Tewari, is a comedy of Errors . It is a crazy film in which anything goes. It is utterly unfunny and riddled with mindless gags that drag beyond acceptable limits. A comedy film comprises a funny script and good dialogues. Unfortunately ‘Mr Joe B Carvalho’ sadly lacks both.
Story: A detective named Joe B Carvalho Based in Bangalore, lives with his visually impaired Grand Mother was entrusted the task is to catch a couple eloped from home without their parents approval and are planning to get married . The eloped heiress gets drawn into a complex situation involving an international killer. This character is sad yet funny in that he beats up a bunch of men – involved in making drugs – just so he can blackmail them into paying his cable bills. He clearly doesn’t realise the seriousness of what they’re doing, and takes it as he sees it: a bunch of men, in a flat, making dough. The detective-protagonist ends up in the terrorist’s hotel room during his search for the runaway daughter and, in the bargain, is mistaken for a killer This detective also has a girlfriend who’s a police officer, and for matters made clear in the movie, the two break up
Review: Hell breaks loose throughout the duration of debutant film director Samir Tewari’s Mr Joe B Carvalho because there’s a daft detective (Arshad Warsi), an eloped heiress (Geeta Basra), some crazy assassins (Jaaved Jafferi, Vijay Raaz, Vrajesh Hirjee), some incompetent cops headed by Soha Ali Khan and God alone who else, chasing one another’s tail in madcap situations set against the backdrop of a marriage.
Forget laughter, the frequent use of in-house jokes and one-liners that are staples with actors like Arshad Warsi and Jaaved Jafferi, who have built their personalities around comic repartee, fall flat in the film because they are so amateurish.
When you are asked to laugh at a visually-impaired person (Himani Shivpuri) falling off balconies or bumping into furniture, or the cross-dressing killer Carlos (Jafferi) — who keeps uttering, Carlos, maut (death) aur potti (shit) come unannounced’ or the lollipop-licking Joe B Carvalho (whose name is often punned on in Hindi), it’s funny for a bit. You can’t cackle for two hours over such insensitivity.
Arshad is a competent actor and does justice to the daft detective role. Surrounded by a bunch of buffoons, he follows his own arc. That is Warsi’s forte: he is remarkably effortless. He can spout punch lines with a straight face and a minimum of fuss. But the Mr Joe B Carvalho screenplay is such a pathetic mess that there is little that he can do to prevent the film from sinking into a morass of its own making.Warsi plays a mamma’s boy struggling to make it beyond the mundane and the meaningless as a small-time Bengaluru private eye. And you only feel sad to see the talent of Arshad Warsi being pathetically wasted in such a bland and boring film. While everyone else in the cast unabashedly hams it up in an attempt to be cartoonish, he stays within the parameters of conventional screen acting.
Soha tries her best to seduce Arshad and the camera in a bikini, mini and a towel. However unlike her mother Sharmila Tagore, Soha lacks sensuality. She does a Salman Dabangg Khan send-up, dives into a swimming pool in a two-piece swimsuit and even performs Cabaret number. She ever wears skimpy clothes. Full marks for effort, zero for impact. Himani Shivpuri is good.. Javed Jeffery hams hysterically. He is seen dressing up as various women while playing the role of Carlos. This seems to pull the movie deeper in to the pit of bad movies.
Ideally, this detective comic-thriller that spoofs mainstream Hindi cinema in a small degree attempts to be somewhat like Hollywood’s Naked Gun series. And it should have made for a goofy film. But after a promising start, Joe B… fails.
It’s a pity that the writer and director didn’t pay more attention. Had the film been as honourable as their intentions seemed (of making a clean comedy that is neither slapstick nor adult), this genre may have actually got a fillip. But there is no respite from the rest of the moronic lot all the way until the climax. The film tries very, very hard to be smart. All it manages to be is downright silly.