Director: Karan Vishwanath Kashyap
Cast: Akshaye Khanna, Satish Kaushik, Supriya Pathak
Score: 0.5/5
Marriages are supposed to be a beautiful thing - at least that's what Sab Kushal Mangal tries to convey even as it literally forces people into wedlock for laughs. But even a serious crime turned into comedy cannot save this tragic borefest, where the only unrealistic thing is probably that people actually follow lane discipline on the road.
The story follows one Baba Bhandari (Akshaye Khanna), a 'failed politician-turned-marriage counsellor', whose entire modus operandi runs around getting guys married against their will, all the while evading the idea of marriage himself. When Pappu Mishra (Priyaank Sharma), an upstart news celebrity gets on his bad side, Bhandari makes poor Pappu a target.
Let's not beat around the bush here: Sab Kushal Mangal is trash. Hot, irredeemable, Great Pacific garbage patch-level trash. There is no redeeming quality in the movie, save the acting of Khanna, Kaushik and Pathak, who are clearly trying their hardest to salvage this incoherent mess.
To begin with, the movie has no sense of direction. It starts with a forced marriage, leads into another forced marriage and then all hell somehow breaks loose as the main character, supposedly a proponent of the law, is literally Stockholm syndrome'd into accepting his situation, all the while a vortex of chaos builds around him and Mandira (Riva Kishan), the main female character who is supposedly very upbeat in the beginning but spends the entire movie moping around like a kid who didn't get their favourite chocolate on their birthday.
The script also lacks any coherency, which may be a new low for mainstream Bollywood. It plays like though the writer was writing this movie, till about halfway through they decided to start another script but somehow haphazardly mixed everything up and decided to jumble both scripts together to meet a deadline.
The only redeeming bits, as mentioned before, are Khanna, Kaushik and Pathak. Their ability to act despite the script shines through in this movie, where the only challenge is to not fall asleep halfway through it - a fact not helped by its trudging, long 2-hour 15-minute runtime, most of it filled with padding and filler. They should've shaved off another half an hour or so, maybe that would've at least made this bearable.
All in all, Sab Kushal Mangal has exactly one thing that is anywhere close to its title. It's a sludgy mess of poor creative decisions after poor creative decisions, leading up to a finale that is as flat as it is mundane, completely desperate to end, even if the end is somehow cheaper than the build-up, if you can call it that.