Tashan

*ing:

Akshay Kumar .... Bachchan Pande
Saif Ali Khan .... Jimmy
Kareena Kapoor .... Pooja
Anil Kapoor .... Bhaiyyaji

Director : Vijay Krishna Acharya
Producer : Aditya Chopra

Music Album : Tashan





Once in a while comes a film that offers itself openly for slaughter by critics. Tashan is one such. Towered by a colourful cast comprising the ever-dependable Akshay Kumar , the super-svelte Kareena Kapoor , the mustachioed Saif Ali Khan and the scraggy Anil Kapoor , ‘Tashan’ is like a package that is beautifully wrapped to conceal its crappy content.

Butlet’s take the good things first.

Three reasons why ‘Tashan’ overcomes your urge to walk out of the theatre – 1) Akshay Kumar. 2) Funny dialogues. 3) Vishal Shekhar’s music.

These apart, there is hardly anything in the film that makes you feel that it is an ambitious project by country’s biggest production house (arguably), which apparently seems to have stamped its own foot on the axe once again after a couple of such blunders that we saw last year. Perhaps it is the YRF tashan.

But Apun Ka Tashan is different. It demands value entertainment for time and money spent. Money lost can still be forgotten and forgiven. But not time.

Mostly set in the dusty towns of India, ‘Tashan’ tells the story of four people, none of who trusts the other.

Bhaiyaji (Anil Kapoor) has graduated from being a local goon in the badlands of UP to a suited-booted don running a thriving extortion racket. But he hasn’t been able to graduate from his desi, rustic lingo. He wants to learn English and speak it like George W Bush does. Make no mistake, Bhaiyyaji will have his own “axis of evil” to battle.

The first pivot in this axis is Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor) who works for Bhaiyyaji but has other plans cooking up in her devious mind. She helps Bhaiyyaji find an English tutor whom she enamors and convinces to swindle a huge amount of money from Bhaiyyaji.

The English tutor, Jimmy Cliff (Saif Ali Khan), falls for Pooja’s charm while teaching Bhaiyyaji. To help her, he robs Bhaiyyaji and finds himself facing the barrel of Bhaiyyaji’s gun after Pooja runs away with all the loot.

Enter Bachchan Pande (Akshay Kumar), a countryside goon, expert at stealing electricity and recovering stolen or missing goods. He idolizes Bhaiyaaji and immediately takes the mission to find Pooja and bring all the loot back.

So Bachchan Pande and Jimmy Cliff hit the road to find Pooja. Find her they do. But the only problem is that Pooja has divided the money and hidden it in different parts of the country. Phew!

The remaining song and dance is about how they retrieve the money. In doing so they discover that their lives are strangely linked.

‘Tashan’ is undoubtedly high on style and attitude. The clothes, the makeover, the oomph quotient – and not to forget Miss Kapoor’s teeny-weeny bikini – they all gel together to make the movie eye-candy. The dialogues are full of funny lines lifted straight from the streets. But they do not form the part of a gripping, moving, progressing plot because there is none to speak of in the first place. The whole hoopla called ‘Tashan’ is about a long road trip and senseless action scenes. Imagine Bachchan Pande single-handedly taking on scores of black-cat commandos or decimating dozens of don’s men.

Akshay Kumar, however, turns out to be the saviour of ‘Tashan’. With one hand scratching his crotch and the other on the trigger of a gun, the actor delights you with his superb sense for comedy. Keeping an innocently straight face, Akshay delivers some ‘killer’ one-liners with such flair that he leaves you in splits.

‘The’ Anil Kapoor comes second in winning you over. His twisted English and his rustic manners stand in sharp contrast to his attire, and Anil portrays well the humour and the dread of his don.

Kareena Kapoor – may God bless her body – is alright in capturing the nuances of her character that bluffs without as much as a wink. She looks a clever fox to a ‘T’. And in the name of action, all she does is brandish shotguns that she seldom fires.

Saif Ali Khan is okay playing a Casanova but his character seems an appendage to the plot after a while. It is hard to figure out why Jimmy lugs around Bachchan and Pooja when he is no longer needed for the progression of the story. Pooja knows where the loot is hidden. Bachchan is there to recover it. But what is Jimmy doing? Flaunting his own tashan?

A few words need to be said about director Vijay Krishna Acharya (aka Victor) who has written Dhoom and Dhoom 2 for Yashraj Films . No doubt, Victor has got punchiest of dialogues in right places. But he has an utterly flimsy story to begin with. And Victor doesn’t have a unique style of directing. The cinematography by Anayanka Bose is a visual treat, and music by Vishal-Shekhar is superb. But Victor fails to yoke all the elements together into a riveting yarn. There are rough edges one too many. Take, for instance, Kareena Kapoor’s “Chhaliya” song in which she appears in a skimpy bikini, and right after the song she is clad head-to-toe immersing the ashes of his deceased father in the holy Ganges.

All in all, ‘Tashan’ is strictly a timepass film. It wouldn’t have been even that had it not been for Akshay.

To put it in the film’s parlance: “The I like Tashan of the Akshay”.