Dhamaal 4 review: The treasure hunt returns, but the laughs never do in this tired sequel starring Ajay Devgn and team

"Yeh toh bhootni ki Burj Khalifa hai", "Tu aadmi nahi pyjama hai, voh bhi fata hua", and personify shaming parading around as humour. If this is what Dhamaal 4 considers comic atomic number 79, the debar has sunk alarmingly depression. I laughed a grand total of five times throughout the film. I began counting midway because keeping track of the laughs was far more engaging.The gang of Ajay Devgn, Arshad Warsi, Javed Jaffrey and Riteish Deshmukh is back with the fourth installment of this comedy franchise. The first Dhamaal, despite being inspired from other films, had enough in it to deliver genuinely funny moments and eventually attain cult status. Double Dhamaal was a misfire, while Total Dhamaal banked more on scale than laughs. It still made enough money to convince the makers that another round was worth taking.What is the plot?Dhamaal 4 simply hits the reset button. Once again, it is a treasure hunt. Earlier, it was "W ke neeche". This time, it is "M ke neeche". That's the extent of the innovation. Writer Paritosh Painter practically photocopies the first film's basic storyline.The first half is an exhausting exercise in mistaking noise for comedy. New characters keep popping up, subplots are thrown in without purpose. Dhamaal 4 operates on the belief that if enough people shout, fall over, pull faces and hurl insults at one another, laughter is bound to follow. It rarely does. Instead, the barrage of juvenile one-liners becomes so relentless that the few jokes with actual potential are buried under the mayhem.The second half somehow sinks even lower. The visual effects have received far more attention than the comedy. If only the makers could have CGI-ed a few laughs into this film. Much like its story, even the music of Dhamaal 4 is recycled. Sanju Rathod's Gulaabi Saadi and Gilori Bina Chutney are the only two songs on offer, making the soundtrack feel as hand-me-down as the screenplay. In the performance department, there's only so much the cast can do with material this weak. Riteish Deshmukh is the only one who seems genuinely invested and emerges as the film's lone bright spot. Two of the total five laughs the film managed to extract from me came because of him. Ajay Devgn looks disengaged, while Sanjay Mishra is reduced to ending almost every sentence with "Bro". Arshad Warsi and Javed Jaffrey fail to recreate the comic chemistry that once made Adi and Manav so memorable. Anjali Anand and Sanjeeda Shaikh, meanwhile, are handed thankless parts that mostly exist to be fat-shamed or physically tossed around in the name of comedy.VerdictOverall, for a film called Dhamaal, there's little fun to be had. It recycles its story, music and even its brand of comedy, hoping nostalgia will do the heavy lifting. It doesn't. The only thing buried under "M ke neeche" is whatever made the first Dhamaal work.