Since his last comedy was a laugh riot, one would but of course expect Priyadarshan to reapply the skills he developed in his next flick. Yes? Sorry, but not always true. Yeh Teraa Ghar Yeh Meraa Ghar lacks the spark, verve and fun pace of Hera Pheri. At best, it will make you chuckle a handful of times, but where are the hearty laughter opportunities?

Daya Shanker (Sunil Shetty) is in the midst of a familial, monetary crisis. He lavishly spent on two of his sisters´ marriages, having to mortgage off both his farm lands and family home to the village Seth in the process. But his business plans to repay the loans fell through the roof, and now he must sell the last family property, a rented out house in Mumbai, in order to avoid the auction of the other estates. If only life were that simple, eh?

Inhabiting the Mumbai residence is a family foursome themselves enduring troubled financial times. They only pay eighty rupees rent a month to Shanker, but in a single income family, making ends meet is tough. So when Daya Shanker orders the family out, eldest daughter and bread-winner, Saraswathi (Mahima Choudhary) refuses to budge. Try as Daya Shanker will, and he sure does try a lot, there´s no winning against tough as nails Saraswathi. Forget his legal knowledge, his bad temper, his lying, his conniving, even his use of police brutality courtesy childhood bum-chum Inspector O.P. Yadav (Paresh Rawal), there´s no winning for Daya Shanker. Or is there?

The plot is most simple, but full of potential. What it needs is a series of amusing sequences to push the narrative forward to an amusing climax. As with any movie though, I will admit, it sounds easier than it is.

Priyadarshan gets side-tracked with non-stop character introductions and development. And as a result, there are far too many characters in this pot pourri movie. All it needed were a handful of really amusing folks to carry it through. I would have loved to see more of some of them, particularly the incomparable Paresh Rawal who is completely wasted in this flick. But instead we have a couple of dozen people thrown at us, each with their own little subplot that never really goes anywhere. Yawn!

All that supplemental activity jars with the principal narrative, itself meandering along at an excruciatingly slow pace. It is amusing and pleasant to discover that Daya Shanker will easily compromise his moral fibre to get the house back, but the point is made the first time he lies to Inspector Yadav. The whole subplot with the loan from Neeraj Vohra to give to dumb lawyer Asrani is frivolous and tedious.

So as we wait for each and every slow step forward in the story, a smile inducing scene or two is presented to us. (The whole "Hasta Hua Yeh Pyaar Chehra" sequence is plenty of fun, even if it is a direct lift from Priyan´s earlier Saat Rang Ke Sapne.) But it just isn´t enough.

Sunil Shetty tries his best to keep us engaged, and for an actor I usually find too wooden, he is quite commendable in his role here. But there is TOO MUCH of him in YTGYMG. Director saab, you should have realized that Daya Shanker´s personality, in spite of his anger management issues, just isn´t funny enough to sustain three hours. Nor is it endearing to hear all that shrill shrieking from Mahima every five minutes. I thought the goal is to make the audience sympathize with her, not want to gag her. More wasting of acting talent.

Technically, the film is better served. Like all Priyadarshan movies, this one too is most visually appealing. The situational songs are well-integrated and novelly presented. Heck, I was most surprised that the song I hated the most on audio, "Alaa Re Alaa", had a most watchable video.

Sadly, great dances and visual appeal can´t rescue a mediocre movie. Priyadarshan ought to know that, having failed before on the narrative front in movies like Sazaa-E-Kaala Paani and Saat Rang Ke Sapne. It just goes to prove two points I guess. First, if a director succeeds once with a specific genre, he may not necessarily have mastered it with that one attempt. And two, we don´t always learn from our past mistakes.