Don’t groan. Give this a chance. It won’t make you dance. But hey Money Hai Toh Honey Hai has a certain sincerity of purpose and a rather sturdy narrative mode that serves the comic purpose until interval. That’s when the pace slackens, the interest-level droops and the chuckles drop drastically to make way for a touching simple and naïve climax that tells us, it’s okay to be ordinary, that living is about letting your dreams run free.

Choreographer Ganesh Acharya’s earlier directorial effort Swami suffered from a well-intended narrative gone awry due to storytelling inertia. This time, Acharya is on surer ground. And it’s got little to with the Mauritian outdoors and the sun kissed beaches that stroke against the characters’ dreams without fanning them to a feverish pitch. Money Haiâ?¦. soaks you in a warm sun without causing us a sun stroke. It’s finally a failed comedy. But it’s an honourable failure.

The first thing that strikes you about this slim satire is the thehrao. Seldom have you seen a less noisy comedy in recent times. The background sounds are kept at a minimum. For once the characters don’t scream inanities and double meanings at one another.

The plot about six incorrigible losers who get a chance in life when a wacky millionaire (Prem Chopra, so over- the -top he topples into the abyss of the macabre) makes the Losers Inc. a chance they can’t refuse. Some of the tracks in the plot are truly funny. Hansika Motwani as a TV icon who wants to break away from her weepy bahu image on a long-running soap (the spoof on Ekta Kapoor is in abject bad taste) is surprisingly in command over the rites of screen excesses. Hansika’s hammy acting is so purposely pitched at an extravagant decibel you can’t but laugh.

Upen Patel’s toy-boy act with the high-velocity Archana Puran Singh is also hilarious. The rest of the comic act swings from rib tickling to drab. But what the heck! No harm in trying to make a comedy that keeps a balance between burlesque and aesthetics.

A remarkable aspect of Money Hai Toh Honey Hai is the choreography. Ganesh Acharya changes tracks as a choreographer. The music and dances in this film have a frisky flighty fruity but tightly-cordoned flavour. Very outdoors, very sexy and different. And it’s not just Govinda who gets to swing to an original beat. Every actor swings into a freewheeling groove. Ironically, Govinda and Aftab Shivdasani, no stranger to the comic mood, are comparatively tame.

Upen and Hansika pull out all stops. And Celina Jaitley playing a fashion designer who dreams of making clothes for the working-class tugs at heart instead of g-strings. The theme of dreamers coming together to assert their yearnings in ways that are sometimes-interesting, sometimes-listless.

But you know what? Money Hai Toh Honey Hai is not half as bad as it could’ve been if the character’s didn’t impose a morality of restraint over the goings-on.