Doctor Doctor review: You may need a doctor to survive this assault on the senses

Sex comedy is a tricky genre to execute even though it has a dedicated audience which laps up even sub-par content owing to the limited choice.

In the past two or three years, Marathi cinema has stepped up to fulfil the demand for adult comedies with films like Boyz (2017), Boyz 2 (2018) and Takatak (2019) with varying degrees of success.

Now filmmaker Pritam SK Patil has contributed another entry to the list with Doctor Doctor (2020). If what you have read thus far makes you apprehensive and you don't wish to read the full review, here is the gist of it: Don't freaking watch this film!

Doctor Doctor is the story of friends Keshav (Prathamesh Parab) and Pushkar (Parth Bhalerao) who are forced to join a medical college by their families. The skinny Keshav hails from a rich wrestler's family (this is supposed to be a joke). His uncle (Ramesh Pardeshi) runs a wrestling akhara and wishes to open a hospital for Keshav.

The film doesn't explain anything about Pushkar aka Pushya's background. These two strangers become friends when they outsmart their seniors at ragging. Both have no desire to become doctors and spend most of their time outside the class ogling at girls and teachers. Pushkar is especially eager to lose his virginity. He has a crush on a classmate, but that doesn't stop him from flirting with other girls.

The wafer-thin screenplay by Sagar Pathak has no semblance of a story. It is just a collection of crass jokes and illogical scenes stitched together with no rhyme or rhythm. As the title suggests, the film is about medical students, but the writers clearly had no idea about the life of medical students or their syllabus. In the whole film, there is hardly one medical jargon used. Nor have the makers put in any effort to make the set look like a medical college.

The film makes a mockery of the medical profession in an insensitive way. Pushkar and Keshav, who have neither the desire nor the aptitude to become doctors, use their own bizarre methods to treat patients. In one scene, we see a patient having a seizure. To save the patient, Pushkar comes up with a unique idea. He makes a female classmate strip and seduce the patient so that he can recover from the seizure! This is just one example of bizarre writing. The film is full of such corny scenes.

Pritam SK Patil's lacklustre direction adds to the viewer's misery. Patil has also tried to comment on grave issues such as medical negligence and the antipathy towards poor patients, but his amateurish handling only makes those scenes unintentionally funny.

Both Bhalerao and Parab are fine actors, especially in comic roles. But Patil has made them overact to such extent that they are unbearable. It's even more frustrating to watch them in such a poorly crafted film, given their talent and filmography.

There is no point wasting time writing about the technical departments of the film because they are all equally bad. You will need to visit your doctor to survive this assault on your senses.

Doctor Doctor is now available on Zee Plex.