From Satyameva Jayate to Mastiii 4, Milap Zaveri’s films may divide critics, but ranking them can prove to be even more challenging than watching them.
Key Points
- Ahead of Tera Yaar Hoon Main, here’s a ranking of every film directed by Milap Zaveri, from his most watchable outing to his biggest disaster.
- The list examines why his debut film back in 2010 still fares better than the rest despite its flaws.
- It also explores how Zaveri’s trademark mix of loud melodrama, mass dialogues and outrageous humour continues to divide critics and audiences alike.
Milap Zaveri’s films require an acquired taste.
They certainly aren’t for everyone. While critics have panned nearly every film he has made, there remains a section of the audience that turns up in theatre halls. How that works remains a mystery.
Is it the songs? Is it the kitschy drama that somehow pulls people in? Is it those dialogues that always seem to have a rhythmic cadence to sound, err… massy? Or is it the way he somehow manages to get good, or at least good-looking, actors to star in his films?
The mystery remains unsolved.
What’s admirable about Milap Zaveri is that you simply can’t keep the man down despite all the criticism his films receive. Sometimes, he takes it head-on on social media, sometimes he responds by making yet another movie.
This time, he is launching a new nepo kid — Indra Kumar’s son, Aman Indra Kumar — in the romantic entertainer Tera Yaar Hoon Main. Releasing in theatres on July 24, the film also stars Akanksha Sharma, Paresh Rawal and Johnny Lever.
Every writer needs a challenge.
Sreeju Sudhakaran takes one on by looking back at every film directed by Milap Zaveri and ranking them from passably entertaining to awful… awful… awful.
1. Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai (2010)
After penning dialogues and screenplays for entertainers like Masti (2004), Kaante (2002) and Heyy Babyy (2007), among others, Milap Zaveri made his directorial debut in 2010 with this romcom.
Starring Riteish Deshmukh and Jacqueline Fernandez, Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai is a decent entertainer with an interesting premise about a nerdy young man helping a visiting alien find her perfect mate in a young superstar. In the process, he obviously falls in love with her.
Occasionally charming and funny, with plenty of celebrity cameos thrown in (Akshay Kumar’s a hoot), Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai feels refreshing thanks to its quirky storyline before eventually trapping itself in a conventional melodramatic third act.
Sure, this ain’t E.T., but compared to the other films on this list, Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai feels like a bizarre outlier. And that’s a compliment.
Now that I am done with the easy part, boy, it’s going to be a real challenge from here on…
2. Satyameva Jayate (2018)
Satyameva Jayate has a plot that feels borrowed straight from the ’80s and ’90s. Even then, there is something curiously magnetic about its template: A younger brother secretly waging a violent war against corruption while his elder brother, a cop, hunts down the killer.
Add the unusual casting of John Abraham and Manoj Bajpayee as siblings, along with some bombastic dialogues, and it’s understandable why some viewers found an appeal in it.
For the rest of us, though, it felt like cringe watching a fine actor like Manoj Bajpayee ham it up like anything, even distracting us from John Abraham’s stiff performance. Then again, that unintentionally became part of the film’s entertainment value.
3. Marjaavaan (2019)
Marjaavaan is a loud, abrasive film that practically hammers your ears with the louder dialogues and the background score, that still had a couple of small positives.
There was this gimmick of casting Riteish Deshmukh as a vertically challenged villain that somehow works, thanks largely to the actor’s invested performance.
His reunion with Sidharth Malhotra after Ek Villain also kind of clicks.
But otherwise, this done-to-death revenge thriller with a love story thrown in is as old as the Himalayas, filled with hammy performances or, in Sidharth Malhotra’s case, a one-note act.
Marjaavaan is just another reminder that some kinds of cinema should have been left behind in the ’90s. Sadly, no one is listening.
4. Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat (2025)
The best compliment I can give this film, which tried to capitalise on the re-release success of Sanam Teri Kasam, is that Harshvardhan Rane and Sonam Bajwa give committed performances to all the melodramatic mush.
Also, I think… I really think… there was an interesting idea buried somewhere in its story about a do-gooder politician facing his greatest moral crisis after becoming obsessed with an actress who has little interest in him.
But instead of turning it into a dark psychological thriller, Zaveri transforms Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat into a melodramatic cesspool that somehow wants us to sympathise with its anti-hero while painting the actual victim in a negative light simply because she is furious at the man who has made her life miserable.
5. Satyameva Jayate 2 (2021)
Don’t be shocked that this one lands slightly above the bottom, it isn’t that this movie fares better; it’s just that the other two are just the worst.
Satyameva Jayate 2 is a truly bad film with dreadful performances and a messy revenge plot. Not even three John Abrahams dressed in the colours of the Tricolour while stopping a helicopter could justify the migraine it induces.
Speaking of which, John Abraham has an inherently likeable screen presence, but there is no denying he is a limited actor. Casting him in not one, not two, but three roles, with little to distinguish them beyond spectacles and moustaches, was certainly… a bold choice.
Satyameva Jayate 2 is so poorly edited, written and directed that it almost makes the first film feel like… no, I’m not writing The Godfather. I won’t. You get the point, right?
6. Mastizaade (2016)
It took six years for Zaveri to direct his second film, and boy, was it a rough one.
He returned with a sex comedy at a time when demand for the genre was already fading, and unlike Masti, it didn’t even have the cushion of an established franchise. Oh, I’m going to regret writing that statement within a few paragraphs.
Mastizaade, despite the stunt casting of Sunny Leone in a double role, simply couldn’t appeal to audiences. It was barely funny, the jokes and visual gags ranged from painfully familiar to embarrassingly crude, and the film relied far too heavily on Leone’s cleavage and her other curves to drag itself through the mess.
You feel bad for Vir Das, who deserves far better material than this. As for Tusshar Kapoor, Mastizaade proves his comic shining only comes when he is in the presence of either Riteish Deshmukh or the Golmaal gang, otherwise he is terrible to watch.
Yet somehow, Mastizaade still isn’t the worst Milap Zaveri comedy he has made.
7. Mastiii 4 (2026)
Look, I have nothing against sex comedies. When smartly written and directed, they can be hugely entertaining in their own space.
Mastiii 4, however, is the absolute pit of the genre. It is banal, vulgar, cheap and juvenile. I could fill this paragraph with every negative adjective in the dictionary and it still wouldn’t fully capture how much I disliked watching this film in theatres.
It insults women, men, animals, all parts of human anatomy, the audience’s brain cells and even the script sense of the cast members who agreed to star in it after reading the screenplay (why, Arshad Warsi, why?). If that wasn’t enough, we also had to endure Tusshar Kapoor trying to pass himself off as a Bihar-born Russian gangster.
If you find find yourself laughing at CGI animals molesting a man, at people farting into someone’s face, or (yuck!) poop being pasted on people’s face… friend, can I recommend a good therapist for you?
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
