A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, Govinda and David Dhawan were a formidable actor-director team who you could count on to deliver a few good laughs. Much time has passed since, but the duo is still flogging the same formulas over and over again. Their latest collaboration, Do Knot Disturb is a flat-out rip-off of the French comedy, The Valet, but if you didn't know that you'd say it's a rejig of their own previous films, Saajan Chale Sasural and Kyonkii Main Jhooth Nahin Bolta, with a generous helping of the director's Biwi No 1 thrown in for good measure. Govinda stars as the cheating husband of a suspicious millionaire wife Sushmita Sen who hires private-eye Ranvir Shorey to follow her husband's every move when she chances upon a photograph of her spouse with sexy item-girl Lara Dutta. To hide his affair from his wife, Govinda tracks down Ritesh Deshmukh, a waiter who can also be spotted in the picture, and pays him to pretend that the siren is in fact, his girlfriend. The wife is not fooled; she plays the situation for what it's worth, making her husband jealous of his mistress' new living arrangement with the waiter. It all ends in an agonizingly harebrained climax at a five-star hotel where much chaos ensues when husband, wife, mistress, her ex-boyfriend, detective and waiter, all show up and run into each other. Its humour derived from such staple David Dhawan clichés as mistaken identities and misunderstandings, Do Knot Disturb is a repellant comedy with irrational plot-points and flaccid punch-lines. The jokes are stale; most of them involve slapstick gags like a corpse getting stuck in a laundry chute, and a possessive ex-boyfriend who goes around punching everyone in sight. Hanging off a wafer-thin premise that barely holds, this film is repetitive and boring, and doesn't even give its actors much scope to push their comic boundaries. The once dependable Govinda is reduced to a mere caricature of his earlier self, his performance now amounting to a variety of facial contortions, and silly dialogues yelled out at the top of his voice. Ritesh Deshmukh and Ranvir Shorey are wasted in thankless roles, and Lara Dutta spends most of the film batting her eyelashes and speaking in a squeaky voice.The film's one major eyesore is the usually elegant Sushmita Sen whose unflattering wardrobe does nothing to hide her sudden weight-gain. As the doubting wife determined to catch her philandering husband, Sushmita ought to have considered sitting on Govinda, and more than likely he'd have confessed his infidelity in the first ten minutes of this film itself, thus sparing us the torture of watching the rest of this drivel.Vulgar, loud and entirely pointless, Do Knot Disturb has virtually nothing to offer anyone with even half a brain. At best, Rajpal Yadav scores a few chuckles with his manic physical comedy. It's hard to believe this film was actually directed by someone. Was David Dhawan ever on the set at all? Perhaps Sushmita Sen ate him! That answers two important questions.
