Donel Sinha The favourite comic trio of every Bollywood movie lover is back. They have done a splendid job again. Raju is more notorious, Shyam is a little foolish but Babu Bhaiyya has lost his mind completely!! It's an excellent movie but many say that it's not as good as the prequel but I would like to say that you definitely laughed more while watching this movie. Neeraj Vora is a good director. Nice dialogue delivery. The scenes repeated from the prequel are equally funny. This movie is in no way behind its prequel. This movie will surely remain a fan-favourite like its predecessor. Watch it again and again but it'll always make you laugh.

travised87 I just watched this one on TV, with some anticipation and a few fears. Both were realised, to my retrospective disappointment:Hera Pheri told the story of three losers, Shyam, Baburao and Raju, and their attempts to escape the poverty and desperation they and their respective families were in to ultimately become rich. A simple story, with a moral angle, and of course, the wider focus on comedy. They get the money, climb out of poverty, all is well, blah blah and the film ends. This is where its sequel starts.There are formulas, patterns, tried and trusted that many directors reuse for their films. The formula for Hera Pheri, was used for hungama, hulchul, and several other subsequent priyadarshan films. Problem is, tautologically speaking, it no longer works for the sequel of the originator.Speaking of circles, the director - who is different from the original - gets himself stuck in a plot circle (no pun intended) and leaves us wondering about the subsequent direction of the film. After losing their property early on in the film, the trio are on the streets, back to square one, and this means of course that the rest of the plot will be about them trying to get back to being rich. Predictable? Yes. Thrilling? No. The problem like I said, is the blind reusage of the winning formula of other films. It seems that there must be a goose chase, and the familiar 'hera pheri' (and all its synonyms) style ending with all characters insanely after the object of desire. To do that, he brings the trio to the footpath, and exasperated, we, with them, start again. this undoing of the original's work to, only to redo it again is an immature directorial gimmick.Hera Pheri was a controlled film, with a simple, poignant tale subsumed into the larger serving of comedy. The 'Hera Pheri' element, was mainly at the end. Here, due to the absence of a plot, it bursts in uninvited half way through the story. This means the relinquishing of control so early on, which is disastrous. We become lost in the madness, and seek an elucidating ending, a 'clear-it-all-out' which doesn't happen. The heaps of plot twists become entagled webs that keep piling up, until at the end, we, exhausted, become more desperate than ever for a clear, happy end to cure our misery. This never happens, and instead what the director does is suddenly in the last two minutes, expect the audience to put on our thinking caps, which we never brought to the film, to swallow the ending. As much as i understood the ending, I was initially in disbelief and frustrated enough to spew expletives.A failure, a case of trying to ambitiously juggle too many things at once is what brings this film down. What he could have focused on instead was perhaps the moral element: how the trio learn that money is not everything, and that happiness actually is about the simpler things in life, etc. Even the characters, seems to have escaped the strings of their puppeteer here. Rawal is excessive, and the other two portray their characterisations poorly this time. It is as though the director hung a piece of meat high up on a string a distance away from the audience, letting them smell and savour its fragrance in the original, and his successor decided to just cut the string and let them devour it in this one. What ever it was, it seemed a cheap imitation of the original, and it didn't help that it was just one of many money-grabbing sequels released in the year.

dev_titans You would have seen Hera Pheri, liked it a lot and then looked forward with happiness when you heard about Phir Hera Pheri. its only when you actually see the movie that you realize how bad it is.the comedy is too goofy and slapstick with nothing as hilarious as the original HP. the only funny dialogues are those that are repeated from the Hera Pheri. the worst thing is that the story line is a complete rip-off of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". the story is absolutely the same except that it has been Indianised (with Bipasha basu providing the glamor) and goofy so-called comedy replacing the action from LS & TSB. The ending sequence is a cut-to-cut copy of the original English movie. the climax setting in the circus and the free-for-all fight sequences are meant only for those with an IQ less than 75.all in all, reminds us that even the original Hera Pheri was a rip-off of a Tamil movie released in the 90s.

xpics A sequel has its upsides and flipsides. The upside is that it can redeem on the recall value of the prequel and attract audiences to the theatres. The flipside however is that it has to meet the gigantic expectations of the prequel to satisfy the audiences sitting in the theatres. Most sequels turn a victim of this flipside. Phir Hera Pheri is no exception. When judged on its own merit, Phir Hera Pheri is a fairly entertaining comedy flick. But comparisons with the prequel, though unfair, are inevitable and that's where the film might disappoint to an extent. The writer of the prequel, Neeraj Vora writes and directs this sequel. Vora manages to pull of the film from where it ended in the first part and also maintains connectivity between the two films. And since the characters were already established in the first part, he wastes no time here to go ahead with the storyline. Raju (Akshay Kumar), Shyam (Suniel Shetty) and Baburao (Paresh Rawal) who earn big bucks at the end of the first part; live a lavish life at the start of the second episode. But with money comes greed for more money. So in the greed to double their money, they borrow more money from underworld and invest it in a chit fund on the behest of Anuradha (Bipasha Basu). But the company turns out to be bogus and thereby they lose all their assets coming back to square one. From here on starts their attempt in paying back loans taken from the underworld. The movie runs on jet speed pace and you hardly get time to breathe, gasp, feel, absorb, react or relate. With every alternate scene a new gang is introduced and by the interval point you have around a dozen mobsters linked to each other. The film is clustered with so many characters that you lose count after a point of time. While Neeraj Vora scores as a writer; to an extent, he fails as a director. On the writing part, despite so many characters to handle, he etches an interesting screenplay connecting all of them. Obviously you are not expected to think logically in today's comedies. Off lately, slapstick has turned out to be an easy alternative to tongue-in-cheek humor. So you don't have to exercise your brains cells when a circus gorilla (a palpable human in a monkey mask) is in pursuit of Johny Lever in the climax, as far as the duo makes you laugh. Or for that matter, don't think twice when the mastermind of first part, Akshay Kumar falls for a silly trap of doubling money in the second. But then these minuscule loopholes can be overlooked.What cannot be overlooked are the over-the-top loud performances. There's where Vora's directorial skills come into question in extracting performances from the cast. While none of the actors are bad, they are unnecessarily boisterous at times. Vora also ends up sketching caricature characters of a stammering gangster duo (played by Sharat Saxena and Ravi Kissen) to evoke humor. The humor is more formulated. While Vora overuses Paresh Rawal, he overlooks Suniel Shetty. Paresh Rawal gets the maximum gags and is ably supported by Akshay Kumar who compliments Rawal for a perfect comic chemistry. While showcasing the dumbness of his character Baburao, Paresh Rawal at times stretches the jokes too far and goes overboard. Akshay Kumar has a spontaneous comic timing, but off late with this similar kind of roles, he is getting typecast. However he's far better tickling the funny bone than indulging in emotional inanities like Humko Deewana Kar Gaye. Phir Hera Pheri essentially tried to use the original Hera Pheri pairing of Akshay-Suniel-Paresh as its USP. But post Hera Pheri; there have been so many films with the trio combination like Awara Pagal Deewana, Aan: Men at Work and Deewane Hue Pagal that there's hardly any novelty or a recreated charm effect when they come together here. One aspect where the film is better than its prequel is that unlike Hera Pheri where there were half a dozen redundant forced songs and item numbers, in Phir Hera Pheri the songs don't intrude in proceedings and are kept at their minimal best runtime. Phir Hera Pheri does induce plenty of laughter. But you do feel that with a little more fine-tuning, it could have been even more hilarious. The extended climax is aptly set in a circus that brings the entire clown-cum-caricature cast together. The movie however ends quite abruptly, keeping enough scope for a sequel to continue the series. We just hope that the next episode gets better.