When YRF lacks Tashan

When flailing YashRaj has to rope in the competition, and the competition ends up being the highlight of its seasonal blockbuster, you know it may be time to start typing condolence letters. (Adi, marry Rani quickly, and take a break. It might rejuvenate your perspective on cinema).

As of now, the critics are drawing comparisons between Tashan and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom : all style, no substance. I beg to differ. I’m one of the few that thoroughly enjoyed JBJ – music, Rikki Thukral, confessions by the café et al. It’d be an insult to put Tashan on the same platform.

Don’t get me wrong – the movie started off wonderfully, and left me gasping by the time intermission came around. The opening shots, of a car careening with two different musical genres inter-cutting from its radio, before plunging into the depths of a river, from where Saif breaks the fourth wall and starts telling the audience what an ass he’s been, is totally brilliant. (The film’s character binaries of language are also instantly established in the two songs, Highway to Hell and Kabhi Kabhie – a masterstroke).

So we’re immediately pulled into Saif’s story of working at a call-centre, bearing a fake English name Jimmy, and falling for a fresh Pooja (Kareena Kapoor), while teaching English to her boss Bhaiyyaji, who turns out to be a regular I’ll-kill-anyone criminal. (Anil Kapoor in a thoroughly unforgettable role). Jimmy falls for Pooja, helps her swindle Bhaiyyaji of 25 crores, which she promptly runs away with. This gets Jimmy to surrender to Bhaiyyaji, who hires a regional, Kanpur-ian goonda Bachchan Pande (Akshay Kumar) to find Pooja and recover the money, with stuck-with-the-rats Jimmy.

What then follows is a two-level road movie, which starts off crisp and engaging due to the originality of the characters, and some absolutely zinger one-liners. The spoof element is always there, especially in the fake rape scene with Kareena and Saif, where his “Why do you need God to save you? Ha ha ha!” totally brought the house down.

But this tightly-wound in your face parody road movie unfortunately starts to unravel quite soon after the interval. The faint echoes of the 70s masala film that was mocked initially, turns serious, complete with its clichés of childhood sweetheart flashbacks, ‘bachpan se bichchad gaye’ theme, the villain roasting his victim with electricity, and loose, barely believable action that doesn’t justify its overblown budget.

While a treat to watch, what was missing from these crucial bits are the tongue-in-cheek elements that the Indian audience is quickly catching up on. When Main Hoon Na first released, with its mid-movie action piece that cocked a snook at Sholay with the Dhanno rickshaw and “ab tera kya hoga Kaalia?”, the critics were just beginning to wonder at the prospect of respectable Bollywood parody. By the time Om Shanti Om came out, everyone, from the audiences to the critics, got it, and were rolling in the aisles.

So when you’re catering for this audience now, your genre parameters should be quite clear. And once they are, you stick to them from beginning to end.


Akshay Kumar, is of course, a complete thespian by now, and he lifts every scene that he’s in. His Ravan entry is phenomenal in comic scale, and kudos to the writers for his character. It’s Pande’s (and Bhaiyyaji’s to a certain extent ) mythological references in the movie that remind us of the constant parallels that 70s action movies were trying to emulate. Good guy versus bad guy, guru and shishya, damsel in distress. His take on the dehati is the perfect foil to Saif’s ‘cool dude’ Indian trying to be American, and gives some of the most thought-provoking nuggets about the value and pre-conceptions attached to English in India, and the prejudices that might invoke.

Kareena honestly deserves better. Post-Jab We Met, she won me over completely, however she proves here she’s more immersed in basking in her new-found ‘it girl’ glory – her face is a treat, while neck down, well. Poking ribs are a sign of malnutrition, as any WHO member can tell you. That Kareena wants to look like Victoria Beckham, in a country where large swaths of people have those same poking ribs, for those exact WHO reasons, is a sad sign for her, for Aditya Chopra, for Bollywood, and the I’ll-lap-up-anything-that’s-marketed-on-TV middle class Indian masses.

In all, Tashan is another hiccup-filled YRF fare that only brightens whenever non-YRF staples are around, ie Akshay and Anil. That’s a sign of things to come, if you ask me. But this is the era of burning Romes anyway, be it the pre-election fervour in the US, the Olympic hoo-haa over Tibet, the protests of monks in Burma, the class action suit against Queen Elizabeth by the Indians in Malaysia. All monopolising monoliths will have to crumble at some point. Which is why I said – Adi, really, get married.