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No, make that his second-favourite past-time. Either Rishi's obnoxious character Bhalla (who takes the cake and the bakery, quite literally) is shown squabbling with his son, or peeing. Or both. There should be laws against films that do this kind of a thing to gifted artistes. All Is Well is… well, not quite well, thank you. One expected the director of Oh My God to be at least funny in the humorous scenes and cocky in the cocky ones. Funny, the film is not. Cocky, it never ceases to be. The narrative is a landmine of trouble. It puts papa Rishi, mama Supriya Pathak, beta Abhishek and pile-on Asin in a convertible that takes them to places where we would never like even our worst enemies to be. And we aren't talking about the outdoor locations that seem to have been chosen for their absence of scenic solace. The nightmare begins early when we see Rishi Kapoor's wastrel character shouting at his wife and abusing his little son. Son grows up into a glowering mass of resentment expressed in songs and music that ought to have been balm for the soul. Instead, the music only adds to the general level of cacophony in the goings-on. The storyline is so absurd that the humour gets hijacked in every frame by disembodied characters who emerge with the purpose of raising laughter. What they do instead is create a sense of growing panic in the audience. It is that sense of nervous anxiety we feel at a wedding where the bride is all decked up but the baraat fails to turn up. The bride, in this case, is the very beautiful Asin. She looks like a million bucks. But what is she doing in this film? And why would she be hanging around a guy who doesn't want her when her wedding is hours away? Her character is embarrassingly parasitical, clinging on to Abhishek, stalking him from Bangkok to Chandigarh in the hope that he would marry her. Such a doormat in this day and age? Tell me it's a joke. On the hand, please don't. Because every time the plot opens its mouth to tell a joke it turns out to be a case of the boy who cried wolf. Struggling through the mess of miscommunicated mirth are actors of undisputed talent. Rishi Kapoor and Abhishek Bachchan struggle through what looks like lines written for a propaganda short-film on dysfunctional families. They shout at and abuse one another and then slow down their mutual diatribe for a couple of introspective dialogues. One of these dialogues between father and son is done in a moving train-compartment constructed so clumsily on a studio set, you almost see the two actors shaking their bodies to simulate the feeling of a train on the move. Every gag falls flat one after the other. Many scenes come on so illogical you want to LOL. Alas, the luxury of laughter is denied in the din of absurdities. Death and disease are reduced to pathetic jokes. One lengthy sequence where a dead man's corpse is taken through narrow lanes for cremation is treated like an extended WhatsApp joke. The film's swoop of puerility doesn't spare a fine actor like Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub. Playing a bumbling gangster in the most awful wig since man invented baldness, Ayyub tries to make the best of a dreadful no-win predicament. Surprisingly, the film's only balanced sequence is a quiet moment between Abhishek and Asin where he rebuffs her affection for the umpteenth time after she offers him a ring. Here Asin's face gets a chance to reflect a serenity and sensitivity denied to other actors throughout the film. Poor Supriya Pathak! Since her character is shown to suffer from Alzheimer's, she can do little more than look lost and bewildered, murmuring disjointedly… somewhat like the film that too loses its plot. Tragically, no one seems to care about the dying laughter in the worn-out, bewilderingly banal proceedings. The last time a road movie fell so flat on its farcical face was in Finding Fanny. Luckily, All Is Well doesn't have the intellectual pretensions of the earlier road film. Not that the proud proclamation of pedestrianism makes the film any more tolerable. All Is Well is a massive letdown from the director of Oh My God. What was Umesh Shukla thinking? If he was thinking at all, that is. Shukla's father-son comedy All Is Well, released on August 21, 2015, was meant to star Amitabh Bachchan as a cantankerous father and Abhishek as his faithful son. But then Mr B was already doing the crabby dad in Shoojit Sircar's Piku. In stepped Rishi Kapoor, and he had a memorable time shooting with Abhishek Bachchan. When Smriti Irani opted out of Umesh Shukla's All Is Well (after being inducted as a cabinet minister) many steps were taken to deal with the crisis. For starters, the outdoor portions which were to be shot in Himachal Pradesh were shot elsewhere. Says the director Umesh Shukla, "Himachal where we were to shoot was inundated in snow. That isn't a good weather to shoot a film. We opted for a dry location, Satara. Smritiji could not give us the time that we required to shoot the film. She was doing something that needed very careful attention. Smritiji's character was not the typical mother who makes gaajar ka halwa and goes, 'Beta beta.' She was there throughout the film. Luckily, we hadn't shot any of the outdoor scenes with Smritiji. So we needed to re-shoot only the indoor scenes with her replacement Supriya Pathak. We had no problems in finding a suitable alternative. Luckily for me, my actors Rishiji, Abhishek and Asin were with me. They agreed to be available with their dates whenever needed. We did the whole film again from scratch. That's all."