Dhoom Dhaam (2025) Movie Review: Yami Gautam & Pratik Gandhi’s Heist Comedy Runs Out of Steam

In the heap of banalities that Hindi cinema has become a staple of, Rishab Seth’s “Dhoom Dhaam” (2025) fails to distinguish itself. This heist caper is indulgent, sloppy, and lacks a grip on itself to orchestrate its barrelling events, all of which unfold within a small window of time. This exigency is crucial to the design of the film. But it jars in leaning into it, reluctant to sprawl into the wildness inherent in the narrative spirit.

Yami Gautam Dhar and Pratik Gandhi play Koyal and Veer, trundled into an arranged marriage. They haven’t even got the time to build an acquaintance. The astrologer suggests a quick marriage within two weeks of the families’ first meeting otherwise they’d have to wait two more years, going by the auspicious charts. All hell breaks loose on the wedding night. Two men show up in their hotel room, demanding the couple return ‘Charlie.’

Neither of the two has any speck of an idea who Charlie is. At their wit’s end, they escape, with the men chasing them. The film follows the breathless pursuit over the course of one night. Several mysteries pop to the fore. Who is Charlie? This becomes the engine for the couple to discover each other in greater detail, and proceed towards a kindling of love and affection for each other.

They are distinctively opposite individualities. She has a motormouth, he is very sober and respectable. She lives with abandon, much to the surprise of Veer who was under the impression that she stuck to the curfew set by her parents. He has too many phobias and lives constantly on a knife’s edge of maintaining caution. She emboldens him to be freer, daring, and adventurous. The film derives drama from their polarities, accentuating their mutual discoveries as propelling the slew of misadventures.

“Dhoom Dhaam” is full of preening, posturing progressiveness in its slant. You sense it’s desperate to be ticked off the progressive label to get brownie points. But quickly it slumps into a sack of conventional ideas and expectations. The binary is upheld and pushed in front right when the film makes a pose of destabilizing it. The film cannot disguise its ultimately dated underlayer that stretches out beyond its sheen.

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Yes, the film inclines heavily to Koyal, invoking her even when she’s absent. It gives her an angry, impassioned rant on the boundaries womanhood has to live within. But it’s all lip service. Her weak-kneed admiration of Veer surges only when he displays brawn and masculine bravado. Before that, we have to endure litanies where the timid man receives an extolling. Such genuflection, though, isn’t very surprising when the makers include Aditya Dhar.

It doesn’t help that neither Yami nor Pratik can spruce up an ounce of romantic chemistry. Hardly does their arc to finding love in each other come about with conviction, even if there’s quite a dose of likable sincerity. The film is too dog-tired, buried beneath a tonne of templates, to break out and sparkle. What it needed was a consistency of wit and humor that leaps off the screen.

Yes, there are way too many stabs at getting the giggles but the film is vapid and ineffective to gel them together, land them with fluency and sass. A film like this also demands the presence of strong supporting characters, certain moments interspersing the journey of the duo over a one-night span to glimmer with hilarity and untrammeled chaos. The trouble here is the screenplay (Aditya Dhar) lacks the sustained flow and force essential to make the misadventures burst with verve and vivacity.

As much as the film ought to shimmer, it struggles to. The writing doesn’t have the charm to coast the film off or the ample jocosity of spirit to fully bolster it. Where is the energy and disarming liveliness required to make the film jump off the ground? Increasingly you find the film veering towards fatigue. The writing underlines the character traits at every point, taking you out of the film entirely in moments that could have been enjoyable.

“Dhoom Dhaam” wends into convolutions, interweaving accidental assumptions, police manipulations, and mistaken identities. The film hews it together without smoothening the creases. As a result, what emerges is a surfeit of lazy, implausibly strung contrivances, too plentiful to overlook. Despite a racing runtime, you’d be hard-pressed to even bother to invest in the tribulations and merry chaos of what unfolds on the screen. It all leads to a silly, groaning climax, a twist cut from the cloth of a dozen seen-there-done-that capers. What should have been a brisk affair quickly turns drab and insufferable.