Sniff – Fails to sniff the pulse

Cast: Khushmeet Gill, Manmeet Singh, Surekha Sikri, Sushmita Mukherjee

Rated: 4/10

Children’s film is still a genre in need of getting its mojo right, that despite many of them being made from time to time by Bollywood.

Amol Gupte is a veteran of this genre and yet he goes wrong with this one, completely wrong actually as he fails to sniff what could have worked for a story around a child who has no sense of smell. The thing about children’s films is that it needs to be essentially endearing which Sniff is not despite the cute sardar child playing the lead. Moving from the vagaries of not being able to smell, to getting the smell nodes back in a surreal chemistry lab accident, to sniffing the criminal behind car thefts in his society — everything comes across as far from real. Also, the society seems to be of senior citizens whom Gupte has rather wrongfully caricaturised.

Wish he was as real with the film as the people he chose to make it around.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 27 August, 2017