Phone Bhoot: If movies like this can’t embrace their own stupidity, how can they expect the audience to?

Some shenanigans and an item number later, Gullu and Major come up with another money-making scheme. They decide that they’ll put their love for horror movies to good use, and turn their passion into their profession. They will become ghost hunters.

For a movie that invites lawsuits from all major Hollywood studios in one scene — Palika Bazar versions of Annabelle, Pennywise and The Nun can be spotted in the item number — it seems to take a suspicious level of offence at the suggestion that it is a Ghostbusters ripoff. Even though it puts both Gullu and Major in homemade overalls and then has them drive around in a red vehicle with a custom logo plastered on the side.

Watching Phone Bhoot on Prime Video (which is where most people will probably see for the first time, considering how badly it tanked at the box office), one thing stands out almost immediately. Director Gurmmeet Singh isn’t targeting the Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 crowd with this movie; Phone Bhoot is a sanitised stoner comedy that appears to be appealing to fans of Wayne’s World and Go Goa Gone. A lot of it, for instance, is set in English. “Dude, we don’t need your doodh,” Gullu tells the milkman one morning. In another scene, a hassled Major tells Gullu to call 911, and is told that that’s ‘an American thing’.

Phone Booth could be cancelled on these grounds alone — it’s unfunny, uninspired, and shockingly dull — but for over an hour, it’s quite impossible to put your finger on exactly why it’s so bad. Until a scene that rolls around a little over the hour mark. By this time, Gullu and Major have partnered up with a ghost called Ragini, played by Katrina Kaif. Having stumbled into a haunting, they come across a man lying on his belly, with a house of cards balanced on his back (don’t ask). He tells them to get lost, and Ragini shoots back, “Abhi pull bana hai, hum chale gaye toh dead-pull ban jayega.”

The joke makes no sense, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing in this movie makes sense. It does, however, reveal what they were going for. They wanted to make a self-aware comedy in the vein of Deadpool, a franchise that has overwhelmed its star to such a worrying degree that he cannot seem to separate himself from it. And suddenly, with this information in your mind, it becomes easy to identify what went wrong here. Movies like Phone Bhoot are supposed to exist in heightened realities, the illusion of which is immediately shattered the second someone inside them remarks at how ridiculous everything is.

So, for instance, every time the movie has Gullu break the fourth wall and announce montage sequences, it is undermining its own efforts to create a believable world. By having its characters acknowledge that they’re in a goofy movie, it’s looking at us, the audience, with a look of needy desperation in its eyes, jerking its head in its own direction, as if to say, “I know, right; how stupid.” The movie wants to convince you that it is smarter than it actually is, or, at least smart enough to be aware of stupidity. But there lies the difference between the audience laughing with a movie or at it; there lies the difference between being a silly movie and being a movie about silly things. It’s okay for Deadpool to do this; self-awareness is baked into the character, and the movies are meta from minute one.

But this schtick gets out of hand in Phone Bhoot when, in an early scene, Gullu and Major receive a prank call from none other than the Fukrey gang — Hunny, Lali, and Choocha — suggesting that Excel actually contemplated challenging Dinesh Vijan’s horror comedy universe at some point, and then fully committed to it as if it was under some sort of legal obligation. Later, when Gullu and Major appear reluctant to listen to something that Ragini is saying, she unscrews a bottle of juice, which magically turns into a bottle of Slice. Ragini proceeds to drink it suggestively, with the “rasiya rang barsa ja” song from those famous commercials playing in the background. Suitably seduced, the boys give in.

Including an unprompted scene in which a woman manipulates men by using her sexuality aside, the Slice scene once again serves the self-defeating purpose of pulling the audience out of the narrative, in addition to blurring the lines between the character on screen and the star playing it. If Katrina can’t take herself seriously, how can she expect the audience to? Once again, you can trace this trend back to Ryan Reynolds, an actor who made sure that his character took a swig of Aviation Gin in Red Notice.

Hiring the compulsively quippy Reynolds was perhaps the biggest mistake that director Michael Bay made while putting together the movie 6 Underground, a would-be franchise-starter so rancid that even Netflix admitted that it stank. Bay’s movies — especially the ones he made two decades ago — are regarded as contemporary classics of the action genre primarily because, despite their inherent stupidity, they never winked at the audience. Those movies understood that they were completely unhinged, but stopped short of having a character admit this on screen. That would be the equivalent of Sonny Corleone questioning his own father’s decisions in that scene from The Godfather. You simply don’t do it. Imagine Nicolas Cage making self-referential jokes in The Rock, or Bruce Willis admitting that his plan to destroy an asteroid using drillers in Armageddon was actually asinine.

Or, to use a more recent example, imagine if Vin Diesel wasn’t deadly serious while flying through the air to rescue Letty in Fast and Furious 6, or if Ram Charan and Jr NTR kept undercutting the earnest drama of RRR by making jokes about how they’re basically gods. Sincerity is a big reason why SS Rajamouli’s movies are so successful; and probably why RRR has been particularly beloved by Americans who’ve become accustomed to MCU blockbusters that constantly undermine themselves by inserting cameos and jokes where they don’t belong.

To be clear, Phone Bhoot is haunted by more problems than just this one; had it been written more skillfully, none of these pointless asides would’ve mattered one bit. But it’s crucial for movies like this to embrace their own lunacy, instead of actively being ashamed of it.