What's it about:
A little sardar kid, Sunny Gill, has a birth defect where his olfactory nerves don't work at all. Thus, he isn't able to smell anything. However, after a bizarre accident inside the chemistry lab at school, he regains his smelling power. Only now, he can smell things at a distance of 2kilometers, and can sniff perfectly what you had for dinner, lunch and breakfast the previous day. Sounds pretty cute till here right?
But in the
second half, this cute little boy suddenly becomes the hero of the society and
starts fighting crime. The rest of the movie goes on in Sunny solving the
dreaded menace of a car thief in the society, just by his newly-found smelling
powers. 
A Still From Sniff
What's hot?
The film has the
flavour of the yesteryear children's films which helmed by CFSI, specifically
targeting the school summer vacations. However, Amol Gupte’s film doesn't have
any social message as such which those films used to have.
Khushmeet Gill -
the little kid who plays Sunny Gill in the film - is flawless. His acting may
stammer a little at times, but that definitely looked cute on the overall
aspect of the film.
Khushmeet Gill In Amol Gupte's Sniff
What's not?
The basic plot
of the film of a little kid suffering from a disease where he can't smell
anything is novel, but the screenplay soon turns away from the innocence of
that and enters into being a detective film, with no thrill at all.
While the other
kids were promoted equally well like Khushmeet, none of them had that much
screen time. They were performing well in the minimal screen space they
received, and that could have been tapped into a lot more scenes and sub-plots.
Sadly, that didn't happen.
Amole Gupte's
direction isn't bad, but it isn't anywhere close to what it was in Stanley Ka
Dabba (2011) or even, Hawaa Hawaai (2014). His previous films did have a social
message, which is something you so look forward to in a children's film,
however, Sniff is made for pure entertainment.
Also, when in
the second half you see that the film turns into a detective film, you expect
Amole Gupte to do justice to the genre by keeping the thrill intact. But that
doesn't happen in even a single frame of the film. Even when the climax comes,
you as an audience have already predicated the end. So, it kills your thrill of
knowing what the detective mind of Sunny Gill has to find out.
Lastly, minimal
promotion of the film might affect its box-office collections.
Verdict:
At little over
one and a half hour, this isn't a bad film for children to watch. However, this
isn't Stanley Ka Dabba or Hawaa Hawaai, so if you are not going to the theatre
to accompany your kid, don't venture out to watch this one.
Image Source: youtube/erosnow & twitter/sniff