Operating as a symbiosis between two previous popular Assamese entertainers, Bidurbhai (2024) and Casetu Nagen (2025), Malamal Boyyyz (2025) is a tiresome comedy that feels repeatedly dated. Apart from some highlights of the buddy comedy that it rides on, Malamal Boyyyz overdoes almost every other aspect. Not only has the film featured the iconic duo Bolin Bora and Ujjal Rajkhowa (of Bidurbhai), but it has also portrayed actor Pranami Bora in much the same way as in Casetu Nagen. It almost felt like she walked straight onto the set of Malamal Boyyyz right after calling it a day on the sets of Casetu Nagen. Moreover, there is also a song sung by Achurjya Borpatra at the beginning of the film, which is, in terms of tone, placement, and overall feel, the direct equivalent of “De Bhagawan” from Bidurbhai.
The story of Malamal Boyyyz revolves around a group of young boys renting a shared space together in Guwahati and trying to find their footing in life. If one is selling tea, another is selling insurance policies. If one is riding for a bike service, the other is desperately trying to get himself in front of a camera. Yes, the city can be really mean, unkind, and ungrateful for those earning low wages, but director Mrinal Deka chooses to show each of these lives individually, one by one, taking his time until he’s finally comfortable to move onto the second act, which doesn’t happen until nearly an hour into the film.
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A comparison will be made to better explain the situation. Imagine if filmmakers Raj & DK in Go Goa Gone (2013) had shown each of the boys’ unfunny fates, stuck in boring offices and doing mundane tasks, one after another; we wouldn’t have reached Goa until the second half of the film. So, how did Go Goa Gone solve this problem? By using a song that delivers everything we need to know about the characters through a montage: “Khoon Choos Le.” In just a few minutes, it captures their struggles, routines, and frustrations, without dragging the narrative down.
Similarly, the entire first half of Malamal Boyyyz could have been a montage. Otherwise, it’s a plain bore. The boys talk about their same broken fate while getting ready for work in the morning, again during their late-night conversations over a drink, and once more when they drop by their friend’s tea stall for a cup of tea. In all these conversations, they end up repeating themselves, circling the same themes over and over without adding anything new.
The writing of the film is bad, the direction terrible, and the editing worse. With monologues disguised as dialogues, each character talks with a theatrical flair that makes the drama of the film unnecessarily higher. It’s understandable that a character aspiring to be an actor would deliver lines like monologues, but the fact that the rest of the characters also behave in the same way makes the film unfunny. The scenes drag with zero excitement, unfolding in the most predictable of ways, like broke boys doing broke-boy things, gunda stereotypes doing evil gunda stuff, and the clichéd moves of people trying to fall in love.
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The clichés are everywhere, and no, it’s not part of any self-awareness or an attempt to achieve a comedic effect. The film plays them straight, without irony. When a gunda kidnaps a businessman (a scene that has no contribution to the overall plot), you can almost hear “Aaj toh sirf kidnap kiya hai… agar paisa nahi mila toh kal teri laash milegi” in the background. And yes, it turns out the gunda mouths a similar dialogue and wastes almost five minutes there.
The rest plays out like a checklist of clichéd Bollywood villainy from the ’80s and ’90s: a dimly lit warehouse packed with empty oil drums, lights with a strange neon glow, an evil boss with a fixation for a particular dress code, and random goons laughing in the background for no apparent reason, one of whom would inevitably have a twitching eye or some other cartoonish defect. It’s all there in Malamal Boyyyz, which makes the film predictable and painful to sit through.
Yes, haters gonna hate and gundas gonna chase, but in this chase the film underutilizes Panchayat fame actors Durgesh Kumar and Ashok Pathak, who play the goon boss and his right-hand respectively, by giving them dull one-liners. It just takes forever for their dialogues and scenes to end as if the director is trying not to leave out a second of their performances on the edit floor.
When the second act finally kicks in and the boys, instead of crying over their fate, step up to do something right (but in the wrong way), the anxiety is found to be missing. When two lovers interact, the romance feels absent, and when a roadside tea stall is being evicted by the authorities, the impact is not felt. All of this is because of the film’s leisurely paced development and the over-reliance on dialogues to do the needful. As a result, it takes the film to a terrifying total runtime of 2 hours and 36 minutes.
Something of real substance only happens after an hour of meandering aimlessly. Actually, there were ways to combine multiple scenes together in the film. For example, in one scene, they have established how cruel the villains are, and in a separate scene somewhere down the narrative, they have also showed how they are well-paid up with the police. To describe it in detail: in one scene, a goon is shown threatening a businessman inside a car, and in another, later on, it’s revealed that the gang is well connected and financially tied to the police. Now, rather than showing two different but related things in different ways, the film could’ve made its point more effectively by creating one single strong scene that establishes both the villains’ cruelty and their ties with the police simultaneously. At least, it would have saved time and some unnecessary monologue-baazi.
There needs to be the mention of another scene, but before that, more on the story. When hit by the worst of days, the boys crack the idea of engaging themselves in agriculture like proud Assamese “sons of the soil.” Since one of the boys owns vast stretches of village land, all they need now is people to work the fields. But finding daily wage laborers is no longer easy, as many Assamese people have moved away from agricultural work, content with receiving subsidized rice from the government. Then comes in the idea of engaging Guwahati’s roadside beggars in the farming tasks, which appears like a solution for both parties – the beggars will earn, and the boys will get their farming done.
Originally, the boys get the idea to employ beggars for the farm work during a late-night tea scene at Paltan Bazar railway station. However, this scene feels unnecessary since the boys had already interacted with beggars earlier in the film—when one of them donated all the vegetables he had bought to impress a girl. This earlier moment could have been used to trigger an effect here.
Let’s re-imagine a key scene from the film. While planning for their farming venture in their room that night, one boy could have complained about being hungry. Another would have said that the kitchen is empty. A third one could have joked that maybe the vegetables were donated to beggars again to impress a girl. This mention of the word ‘beggar’ would then naturally remind them of the beggar situation in Guwahati, bringing forward the idea to engage them for farm labor and thus eliminating the need for the station scene entirely. So, such compressions were very much a possibility in the film, which would have made the script tighter.
Now, to write about the comedy of the film in very simple words: it’s forceful and uninspired. In one scene, the boys visit their friend’s tea stall for a casual cup of lemon tea. But instead of using actual lemons, the friend crushes a few tangy lozenges into the tea, citing the high cost of lemons. Disgusted, the friends walk away, and one sarcastically remarks that he might as well have used a five rupee Vim dishwashing bar since it claims to have the power of a hundred lemons. So, that’s supposed to be a comic gag in the film. The interpretation of the level of comedy here is left open for the readers.
To top it, the climax descends into a full-blown chaos, much like the recently released Casetu Nagen, which itself drew inspiration from classic Priyadarshan comedies. But when the chaos lacks rhythm or purpose, it just feels noisy, not funny. The same is applicable for both Casetu Nagen and Malamal Boyyyz.
But there’s good humor as well. One instance of such humor in the film was bringing in actor Ashim Kumar Sarma and pairing him with Ujjal Rajkhowa. The character played by Ashim Kumar Sarma instantaneously identifies the character of Ujjal Rajkhowa as having seen him somewhere (Can you guess where and how?). This is a sly nod to Bidurbhai with a twist. But only the viewers of Bidurbhai will be able to relate to this joke the best.
The youth-employing-themselves-in-agriculture aspect of the film has been appreciated by audiences and is thought of as being the most original, but apart from the engagement of street beggars, the entire idea of farming for livelihood and self-sustenance has already been explored in Munin Barua’s Priyaar Priyo (2017). This idea might have clicked with the audiences, but if thought of along critical lines, Malamal Boyyyz misses out on genuine appropriation of ideas here.
So, in short, overlong and deprived of complete originality, Malamal Boyyyz suffers from its own overdrawn dramatics. But the worse is yet to come because Malamal Boyyyz promises to return in the form of a horror-comedy. Yes, there’s the tease of a sequel just like Joy Hanu Man (2024) had ended with the promise of a second part. Now whether the sequel will materialize in reality or not is a different issue, but my only request to the makers is that, “make the new film shorter and crisp and please get some good jokes.”
Malamal Boyyyz also stars Nabajyoti Nath, Jintu Kumar Kashyap, and Junu Nath Deka, among others. Claimed to be one of the successful films of recent times, Malamal Boyyyz had a successful box-office run by unfailingly continuing to amuse audiences for almost a month in the cinema halls across Assam.