Dhamaal 4 walks into theatres carrying nearly two decades of goodwill from the 2007 original, and it burns through almost all of it in two hours and twenty-three minutes. Directed by Indra Kumar and stuffed with what feels like half the Bollywood phone directory – Ajay Devgn, Arshad Warsi, Riteish Deshmukh, Jaaved Jaaferi, Ravi Kishan, Sanjay Mishra, Upendra Limaye, Anjali Anand, Sanjeeda Shaikh, and Esha Gupta, the film is less a movie than a franchise going through the motions because the box office once loved it here.
The setup is the same treasure-hunt skeleton the series has used since the beginning: an antique dealer named Guddu (Devgn) gets wind of a pirate’s buried fortune, and every other character in the film, a pirate crew led by Ravi Kishan’s Adhoora, Warsi and Jaaved Jaaferi as squabbling brothers, Riteish Deshmukh and Anjali Anand as a bickering couple, ends up chasing the same map fragment across land, water, and air. A group of eccentric, money-hungry misfits race against each other to find a mythical treasure hidden on a remote island, running into a bumbling crew of modern pirates after the same loot. It’s a serviceable premise, but nobody involved seems interested in doing anything new with it. The film essentially repeats the template of the first Dhamaal and Total Dhamaal, so there’s no novelty and you can guess where it’s headed.
What actually earns the film some goodwill is Ajay Devgn, who shows up genuinely energized rather than phoning it in, even if he’s still wearing sunglasses in scenes lit for evening. His scenes with Sanjay Mishra are the rare stretches where the comedy actually breathes, and one critic pointed to the same pairing as the source of the film’s only real chemistry and laughs. Anjali Anand also deserves a shout-out: whenever the script momentarily stops using her for weight-based punchlines, she has real comic presence, and her “Hulk smash” moment is one of the few times the film feels alive. It’s a shame that’s not the norm, multiple reviewers flagged the same problem, noting that her character’s entire introduction is built around fat jokes, with a blow-horn sound effect on her entrance and a plot beat where a co-star drugs her rather than share a bed with her.
The bigger issue is that Dhamaal 4 looks and feels cheap in ways that are hard to ignore. Backstory sequences are rendered with AI-generated visuals instead of actually filmed. The opening prologue uses AI avatars of Satish Kaushik and Jackie Shroff to narrate the treasure’s history rather than shooting a real scene, and it shows immediately, undercutting any sense that real craft went into the film. The CGI doesn’t fare much better: a Temple Run-style chase sequence looks unfinished, and it bottoms out with Devgn doing a stunt while riding two badly rendered CGI dolphins.
Then there’s the advertising. This isn’t a film with product placement so much as a film interrupted by commercials. Characters unlock cars through the MG Motors app, a cookware brand survives a crocodile bite in a scene built around nothing else, and there’s a whole beat where a character stops mid-conversation to remember she’s forgotten to bring out a branded snack box, in what amounts to a Gopal Snacks ad wearing a movie as a disguise. It’s shameless in a way that breaks whatever immersion the comedy was building.
Indra Kumar’s direction leans entirely on shouting, slapstick, and body-shaming humor that hasn’t aged well, before pivoting in the final act to a preachy, tears-and-family-values ending that the film hasn’t remotely earned. It’s a whiplash so severe that at least one critic said the “sweet” closing moment between Riteish Deshmukh and Anjali Anand’s characters is more likely to draw unintentional laughter than emotion.
Dhamaal 4 bets everything on the assumption that people will show up for the name alone. And going by opening numbers, it’s a bet that’s paying off, the film earned ₹13 crore on its opening day, and it closes with a tease for a fifth installment. Whether that one manages to be an actual comedy, rather than a reunion tour with a treasure map, remains to be seen.
Verdict: 2/5 starts. Devgn’s energy and a couple of Anjali Anand’s moments keep it from being a total wreck, but the AI shortcuts, dolphin CGI, wall-to-wall product placement, and tired jokes make this one for nostalgia completists only.
