Mastiii 4 review: A desperate attempt to save 'the men will be men' genre of comedy!

Bringing back the OG trio of Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi, and Aftab Shivdasani, Mastiii 4 is, at best, a brain-rot comedy stitched together with old-uncle WhatsApp-forward humour.

If anything, shows of the recent past likeAdolescence or The Pitt, both touching on the rise of incel culture, make one thing painfully clear - men’s insecurities are skyrocketing faster than we can blink. Patriarchy once handed them a lifetime all-access pass to do anything, while getting away with everything and now that it’s being revoked, the blame naturally falls on women and feminism. But this isn’t remotely new. Husbands have long joked about how marriage brought wives only to cut their freedom short and every time a woman points out the sexism in the joke, she’s accused of not being able to take a joke. The Masti franchise has been running on this exact engine for three films, and Mastiii 4 proudly sticks to the formula. In fact, it’s so convinced of its own cleverness that it believes giving women the same “space” to misbehave will neutralize the offense, only to expose how shallow the male gaze truly is.

Since nothing in this universe evolves, the storyline doesn’t either. We meet the OG trio one again - Amar (Riteish Deshmukh), Meet (Vivek Oberoi), and Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) who are now married to three young women who look so similar to each other that the film dares you to keep track of whose married to whom. Amar, an animal mating expert is married to Bindiya (Elnaaz Norouzi) a charity-obsessed caricature, Meet, a car sales dealer is married to Anchal (Shreya Sharma) who is pathologically suspicious of him and Prem, a doctor is married to Geeta (Rihu Singh) who is religious to the point of celebrating every global festival. The one thing they all share is that all the women are terminally dumb and deeply distrustful, which would have been fair if the men weren’t busy lusting after everything that breathes.

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Things shift when the couples meet Kamraaj (Arshad Warsi) and his wife Meenka (Nargis Fakhri), who introduce the group to the concept of a "Love Visa", a one-week break from monogamy. In an era where open relationships aren’t unheard of, it’s not the wildest idea, but the film treats it like a revolutionary bombshell. After the husbands suffer through a cringe, hilariously pathetic break week with zero payoff, the wives take their turn and, naturally, end up with three conventionally hot men - Don Pablo (a weird Bihari accented Tusshar Kapoor), the cop (Shaad Randhawa), and the hunk (Nishant Malkani). And after years of objectifying women, the franchise briefly flips the gaze onto men, only for the husbands to spiral and attempt to stop their wives, leading to a twist that thinks it’s smarter than it is.

Expecting the franchise to evolve from Masti to Grand Masti to Great Grand Masti and suddenly start respecting women would be delusional of me. But as the film keeps reminding us, sometimes literally every few minutes, this is Mastiii 4 - you can’t help but ask why it's needed to exist at all. To be fair, I get that there is an audience for these films including women in the same theatre as me, who were laughing and having fun.Though exaggerated satire only lands when executed well! Here, the comedy begins with objectifying women, detours into mocking old people, insensitively uses queer and trans people as the butt of the joke, crude visual gags about genitals, horses mating, kicks in the nut shots, anal or nipple jokes, even childbirth is played for cheap laughs. It all ends without making any meaningful point beyond “boys will be boys, unless their wives do it too.” At this point being the fourth film, it’s not even offensive enough to provoke; it’s just simply exhausting.

So when the Milap Milan Zaveri's film hints at a Mastiii 5 in the end, despite the men being called out for behaving the same way in each part, it lands as the biggest joke of all and the only one that worked for me!

Mastiii 4 is currently running in theatres near you!

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