Murder Mubarak

Murder Mubarak Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Sara Ali Khan, Pankaj Tripathi, Vijay Varma, Karisma Kapoor, Brijendra Kala, Aashim Gulati, Suhail Nayyar, Sanjay Kapoor, Deven Bhojani, Tisca Chopra, Priyank Tiwari, Dimple Kapadia, Tara Alisha Berry, Varun Mitra

Director: Homi Adajania

What’s Good: The technical saviors of this world who invented the option to watch a video in 2x speed

What’s Bad: You still have to watch it to complete it!

Loo Break: Take as many as you want, and there’s no need to pause your screens!

Watch or Not?: Yes, for a good sleep.

Language: Hindi

Available On: Netflix

Runtime: 2 hours 20 minutes

User Rating:

The film is based on a book by Anuja Chauhan, and the book is titled Club Me To Death. Now, while Ghazal Dhaliwal and Suprotim Sengupta adapted this book into a screenplay and presented a whodunnit, they forgot to incorporate the most important and essential element of this murder mystery – mystery.

Generally, the blueprint of murder mysteries revolves around a murder; in Murder Mubarak’s case, there are 3 – 4 murders, and then there are n number of suspects, which in this case are difficult to count.

Basically, Murder Mubarak is about eight suspects who belong to a high-profile elite club and happen to turn into suspects after a dead body is found in the club on Diwali’s Tambola night. All the eight suspects are fighting their inner demons: a hopeless lover, a B-grade actress with a haunted past, a maid with an abusive husband, a mother struggling to save her son from sinking into drugs, a royal maharaja with a troubled identity, and an old aged woman fighting her lust. But do all these people with terrible issues make for a good suspect? Let us find out.

Murder Mubarak Movie Review: Script Analysis

The whodunnit starts off straight with the point – a murder that happens in the first 5 – 10 minutes of the film. The case is entrusted with ACP, played by Pankaj Tripathi and his subordinate. Now, as soon as he starts the investigation, the main problem of this film gets highlighted. This murder mystery has been tried to present in a hilarious manner with shades of dark comedy, but the laughs definitely do not get catered.

The very next problem with this film arises when too much starts happening in a single scene. It is so cluttered that despite not suffering from OCD, you would have a terrible feeling to organize it in a much better way than Homi Adajania has attempted to. Definitely, murder mysteries need to develop a certain level of suspense to keep the audience hooked.

But as much as one should not mix two types of alcohol if one can’t handle it, he should not have mixed humor and suspense in a single script when he was struggling to handle one logically, aesthetically, and creatively. Handling so many suspects definitely seems a problem that Homi and his writing team could not resolve from the very first go. Making these suspects look like a bunch of lunatics could have been a brilliant attempt since it could convince the audience that none of these fools could attempt a murder.

However, as interesting as this take would have been, the story from the beginning is so shoddy that the puns and, after a point, even Pankaj Tripathi starts to irritate you. While so many suspects should have taken brilliant subplots and time to establish these plots, literally nothing happens in the investigative scenes of the first part.

While none of the characters are strongly established, the second part starts shifting towards the main leads (so to say) Sara Ali Khan and Vijay Varma, trying to solve the case parallelly and taking their not-so-required romance to another level with a love-making scene and a song out of nowhere. By this time, my head was spinning way too much to empathize with those who had signed up for this film.

Murder Mubarak Movie Review: Star Performance

There is no star in the film because there is no performance in the film. In fact, it feels like no one knew what they were supposed to do on camera. And suddenly, everyone tries to put up a worthy performance or rather overperformance when the focus shifts to them for 60 seconds!

Ideally, the star of this film could be simply Brijendra Kala for his briefest appearance and making an exit (I think deliberately) as soon as possible because he might have cracked that they will take an eternity to crack this oh-so-obvious film.