Spoiler warning – plot revealed
Though Arshad Warsi kept uttering “My name is Anthony”, he may have wanted to utter “Mein Anthony Gonzalves nahi ban-na chahta” (I dont want to be Anthony Gonzalves) instead, as the first scene in the movie “Anthony Kaun hai“. Firstly he doesn’t even get to utter mouthfuls like “You see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity”. Plus there are people after his life because of the filmy name, which happens to belong to a journalist wanted by the local goon! He might as well have kept his name as Munnabhai. Talking of names, Arshad Warsi, is given a unique name “champ” (sounds like a dog), aka Champak Chaudhry, who lands up in one soup after another with the final soup being almost getting killed by a hitman. Like an innocent lamb, he unfolds his story to the hitman Master Madan (Sanjay Dutt) who has a propensity to shoot ppl as casually as swatting mosquitoes.
The story starts with a lot of twists in the tale. As filmy as it could get, I actually thought towards the end that Champ would be the real Anthony and would have been fibbing all this while to Madan. Champ is a local goon in love with a dame, but since there’s a love triangle here, Champ lands up in jail due to the efforts of his rival, just before he marries his lady love. In jail he meets another goon (Raghubir Yadav) who has a beautiful daughter and diamonds worth a gazzilion. Champ helps him out, falls for the daughter, gets the diamonds thru a series of twists and complications (including a change of ID aka Anthony) and just when he’s nearing his journey, he gets cornered by a hitman who listens to his story since he has nothing else to do, till he gets the supari to kill Anthony.
All in all the dialogues are quite entertaining (for eg. the dig on Air India), songs are REALLY bad (what can one expect from a-song-a-day-reshamiya), the dances are equally repelling, nubile nymphets showing skin are ample, Sanjay dutt and Mungeri Lal (Raghubir yadav) are wasted. It’s an out and out Arshad warsi movie. I like the way they have 2-3 styles of presenting the same shot. Anusha Dandekar can obviously not act. Minisha Lamba pouts and tries to look masoom in the whole movie. And yes, I like Sanjay Dutt’s car too. And Ravi Vaswani brings back the good old ‘Jaane bhee do yaaron’ memories. A good entertainer and yes, though you don’t need to leave your brain behind at home to find it funny, you can shut it off during the scenes where Raghubir Yadav does magic.
