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“Madgaon Express” starts off strong – three teen boys who’ve just finished school decide they want to do a Goa trip, but their parents turn them down. Their beer-babes-beach holiday remains a dream for years and will resonate with anybody who’s had a hard time manifesting plans to have a fun vacation with their best friends. However, when the friends finally decide to take their long-pending trip, it turns into a crazy nightmare involving drugs, local mafia, guns, and violence. But despite the madness, the movie is humdrum in large parts.
Written and directed by Kunal Khemu, the Bollywood comedy “Madgaon Express” stars Divyendu Sharma as Dhanush Sawant, AKA Dodo, the slacker of his friend group, who is stuck doing random low-paying part-time jobs in Mumbai, while his close friends Ayush Gupta (Avinash Tiwary) and Pratik Goradia, AKA Pinku (Pratik Gandhi), seem to be living it up with high-paying jobs abroad. Not wanting to feel left behind, Dodo creates an online charade of being wealthy, well-traveled, and well-connected by constantly sharing fake edited pictures of his fun exploits, like trekking to the Everest Base Camp. So when Ayush and Pinku decide to visit him in Mumbai, Dodo panics and comes up with the brilliant idea to travel to Goa with them, but like when they were young and broke in college – do a shoe-string budget holiday. The cheap trip ends up costing them more than they bargained for!
The first half-hour of “Madgaon Express” is sort of entertaining, especially due to the relatable FOMO (fear of missing out) Dodo suffers from watching all his friends do better than him. Dhanush Sawant is annoyingly entertaining as Dodo, while Pratik Gandhi as Pinku, the anxious mama’s boy who carries a bag full of medicines is hilarious, and Avinash Tiwary just about works at their third friends Ayush Gupta. Thanks to an accidental mix-up, the three friends get caught up between two feuding local gangs, one is a fierce saree-clad all women gang led by Kanchan Kombdi (Chhaya Kadam) and the other is a drug cartel run by Mendoza Bhai (Upendra Limaye).
Once the drugs, and gangs come into the picture, “Madgaon Express” seizes to be as engrossing, and becomes a formulaic stereotypical “Goa Trip Gone Wrong” movie, which aspires to be somewhere between “Dil Chahta Hai” and “Delhi Belly”, but is neither as memorable, nor as comedic. Ironically, it’s often the old, tried and tested tropes that might make you laugh out loud in the film, like a sequence towards the end, where the boys have to dress up as women to infiltrate Kanchan Kombdi’s gang. Bollywood comedies have long relied on the cross-dressing trope for comic relief, and it still may tickle the funny bones of some viewers.
The background music works well, but aside from one song-and-dance sequence showing the friends partying in Goa, the other songs were unnecessary and only bloat “Madgaon Express” to a 2-hour and 23-minute length. Unlike its name, the runtime doesn’t feel like it’s running at express speed, and is filled with barely funny twists and dialogues. All that said, the last five minutes of the movie actually had a few fun twists, and it ends on a hilarious note, if only the creators could’ve managed to keep it fresh throughout, it would’ve been a lot more watch-worthy. Watch if you are looking for chaotic, no-brainer comedy.
You can stream “Madgaon Express” on Prime Video.
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