Tees Maar Khan

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 24th December, 2010
Time : 135 minutes
Director : Farah Khan; Writer : Shirish Kunder; Music : Vishal – Shekhar & Shirish Kunder (background & title track)
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Akshaye Khanna, Arya Babbar
There are three great moments in the film. First, I loved the opening credits (quite innovative) and funky with the title track playing in the background. Second were the end credits, with Farah Khan continuing her tradition of filming everyone during the roll, right from the lightboy to herself. Third was Sheila ki Jawani. Watching Katrina pulsate and groove on the big screen, with her dresses slung impossibly low (even lower than Shilpa Shetty’s sarees), was something special. The rest of the film was terrible.



The story is pure nonsense. A great con-man, played by Akshay Kumar (we’re never given any proof of his exploits apart from a very very silly airplane caper) is hired by the evil Siamese twins (Raghu & his twin brother) to recover their loot from the cops (the most bumbling kind you’ll ever see) who are transporting all 10,000 kgs via train. Apparently Akshay is the only guy who can do this. He concocts a truly artrocious, hare-brained scheme, enlists the support of a famous actor (Akshaye Khanna), who has an Oscar fetish, and a whole village of idiots to try to steal back the treasure. Will he succeed ? What will the evil brothers do ? Don’t hold your breath, it aint worth it…



Akshay over acted, tried too hard and was too loud in keeping with the general tenor of the film. Katrina, playing Askhay’s girlfriend and a wannabe item girl, was very good, both in terms of looks and performance, playing the bimbette to perfection. Akshaye demonstrated once more why he is a fantastic actor, wish we saw more of him and in better roles.


The jokes & even the capers are silly, crass and crude. Tawaif’s, dumb cops, lipstick marks, loud, almost fluorescent clothes. The only time the jokes are funny is when they’re the insider industry jokes and most of them are against SRK. His angst at missing out on Slumdog, the craving for an Oscar, the six packs. But sadly these moments are far and few in between.


This film is another of those where I’m left full of regret at what could’ve been. What a platform this film had built in terms of excitement, hype and music. It had brought the audiences flocking back to the screens. Alas, its life is likely to be even shorter than Shelia’s now infamous Jawani…

Action Replayy

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 5th November, 2010
Time : ~140 minutes
Director & Co-Writer : Vipul Amrutlal Shah; Co-Writers : Aatish Kapadia, Suresh Nair; Music : Pritam
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Om Puri, Kirron Kher, Neha Dhupia, Rannvijay Singh, Rajpal Yadav, Sudeepa Singh

Take "Back to The Future" (a classic). Attempt Indianisation via heavy dollops of unwanted emotion, inane dialogue, silly characters, logical flaws and a ludicrous ending. And you get some idea of the angst I feel after having watched this film.


Aditya doesn’t want to get married to his girlfriend as he feels marriage leads to terrible things. Case in point are his constantly bickering parents, Akshay & Aishwarya. However, when on their 35th wedding anniversary they seem to be on the verge of splitting up, he suddenly cannot digest it, he rushes to his girlfriends grandfather’s place, gets into his time machine and travels back in time to try and make sure they love each other when they get married. Sounds illogical ? It is…


All characters are shallow, a horrible stereotype without any depth or likeability. Each person seems to be wearing floral, psychedelic colours and were denims even in existence in India in 1975 ? The shoddy animation in the beginning and slapstick ending ruins the film completely and the rather simple plot is stretched and stretched till our sanity is close to breaking point.


There is too much emphasis on looks, camera angles and clothing rather than the script. In the edit (quite a few jumpy cuts in the film, BTW) they seem to have forgotten simple things like what is it that Aditya tells his parents & grandparents to become friends with them and start living with them ? At the end there is a reference from each of the grandparents, while bidding goodbye to Aditya, saying they will miss him, miss his constant compliments but we never saw him interact with them or compliment them !

Akshay’s transformation was mildly interesting though his overall look was terrible. Aishwarya’s make-up looked odd but still looked good. And while Aditya showed some breeziness, the film struggles as a whole, purely due to script and edit issues. Neha looked good.


The sad part about this film is that with a little more effort, it could’ve been brilliant. In its current form, it is highly irritating…its a shame that 25 years after Back to The Future we werent able to make a film that could even come close...time for me to do some time travel and watch it again !

Kambakkth Ishq

Rating : 2/10
Release Date : 3rd July, 2009
Time : 142 minutes
Director : Sabbir Khan; Writer : Sabbir Khan, Ishita Moitra; Music : Anu Malik
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Aftab Shivdasani, Amrita Arora, Vindu Dara Singh and Guest Appearances by Sylvester Stallone, Denise Richards, Boman Irani, Kirron Kher, Brandon Routh

All the beautiful locations, the Hollywood stars guest appearances, the cool threads, the various long legs, lingerie and swimsuit shots, the repeated use of swear words cannot hide the fact that the movie is an asinine farce, running on empty, with no script worthy of its name, no plot, nothing holding the film together. Everything in the movie reeks of trying to be big, bigger than anything before – the stunts, the Hollywood biggies, the completely unnecessary locations (the whole Italy shoot was redundant). The sad thing is that the current movie-starved audience may still make this one a commercial success...kambakkth luck !


Akshay Kumar, super stuntman hates Kareena (a part time model who is trying to be a surgeon). Just to emphasize that point and ensure no one doubts this fact, they call each other bitch/dog/bastard a couple of dozen times. At one point, though, Kareena has to perform an operation on Akshay and mistakenly leaves her musical watch (which plays ‘om mangalam’) inside him. Then she has to pretend to be in love with him to retrieve it. That’s really about it. Except there are many stupid sub-plots to accomodate Aftab Shivdasani, Amrita Arora, Kirron etc etc

Kareena pouts as only she can, shows off her long legs, her size zero figure and cleavage repeatedly. No complaints so far. Akshay, though, is so way over the top, – right from his clothes, which reek of someone desperately trying to be cool, to his very jerky and loud acting, that it makes you cringe. He seems to have lost his way. He’s much better than this and I wish he would do a pure, slick action thriller and not farcical comedies.


Its loud, screechy, makes you laugh about once per 25 attempts, vulgar in parts, completely implausible in all other parts. The kids and all of those with a similar IQ loved it. All others will hate it and will think twice before watching the next Akshay starrer, especially after its coming so close to his previous turkeys.

P.S. There’s plenty of eye candy throughout the film but the sheer number of such shots and the swear words really make me question the U certificate.

8X10 Tasveer

Rating : 4/10
Release Date : 3rd April ‘09
Time : 125 minutes
Director & Writer : Nagesh Kukunoor ; Music : Bohemia, Neeraj Shridhar, Salim-Sulaiman
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Sharmila Tagore, Girish Karnad, Ayesha Takia, Anant Mahadevan, Rushad Rana, Benjamin Gilani

A very interesting premise, that of a man who can transport himself into a photograph and see things from the point of view of any of the characters in the photo, and a pretty good, tense build up amidst lovely landscape in Canada is almost scandalously spoilt by a terrible, illogical ending which leaves you wishing you could transport yourself back in time till before you entered the cinema hall.

Akshay is a rich kid who loves the environment so much that he works for the environmental protection agency (EPS) and is also estranged from his father, who is in the oil business, over the same issue. His father, unknown to Akshay, is about to hand over all his wealth to the EPS but dies just before he could do so. Was it an accidental death or was it murder ?And were any of the other persons on the yatch involved ? A very shifty looking uncle, Anant Mahadevan ? Or the mother, Sharmila ? Or the trusted friend and lawyer, Girish Karnad ? Or Akshay’s friend, Rushad, who looks too good to be true ? And just to add to the merriment there is an oddball detective, Javed Jaafri (who else ?) and Akshay’s girlfriend, Ayesha.


The first half is pretty good, keeps you engaged and builds up nicely, if you’re able to overlook such implausibilities as Akshay jumping off a 100ft cliff into a lake, which is so shallow that he can stand when he surfaces or a romantic song which ‘breaks’ the tension and kind of became a pre-intermission toilet break for most of the audience. Canada, as everyone knows, is beautiful and the camera showcases precisely that. I wish though, that I could reveal the end, as approx 30 minutes before the film ends, it starts to irrevocably go wrong. The twist was too predictable and also too implausible in the way it is developed. None of the characters is built up at all, including Akshay, who comes across too cold and too flat, kind of like Harbhajan bowling when he hasn’t yet taken a wicket (you guessed it…am fresh from watching the India- NZ Test match).


Its sad because this could’ve been great. It’s a very original and novel premise (am happy to be corrected, if anyone knows otherwise ?) and surely it deserved better. As it turns out, no one shines in this mess, except to a small degree, Canada.

Chandni Chowk to China

Rating 3/10
Running Time : 154 Minutes
Release Date : 16th January, 2009
Director : Nikhil Advani ; Writer : Rajat Arora, Sridhar Raghavan; Music : Sneha Khanwalkar
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Ranvir Shorey, Mithun Chakraborty, Roger Huan, Chia Hui Liu

This is a great movie for those who’ve had 6 beers (or an equivalent amount of alcohol), or for kids (and those similarly intellectually inclined) or those who are fans of the mindless timepass genre, where you leave your brains at home, land up for the movie and then giggle aimlessly for the next three hours.

All others, like me, will find this movie a disaster. And the sad thing is that they had an interesting premise – a Chinese village, suffering from a tyrant, finds out that they can be freed by an ancient warrior who has been reborn in India. But then its almost as if the ‘brains’ behind the film decided to see how much they could dumb it down, how much unneccessary slapstick & nautanki they could throw in, how complicated (actually that’s too soft a word, convoluted is probably better) they could make the plot. How many films could they ‘borrow’ from – there are shades of Mr Natwarlal, Goldfinger and most old Hindi movies, with the whole twins separated at birth, amnesiac father et all. And in general, how far away from reality could they go…

If it weren’t for Akshay, who still comes through with at least his acting reputation intact, if not his judgement, the rating would be even lower. Deepika is ok, looks good as always. Most others, well actually I’m being unfair on the actors as they were probably doing what they were told. And the songs were in keeping with the rest of the film. Effects, scenery and cinematography is decent. Fight sequences are ok ok - again too far away from reality for me to enjoy, they've almost created a real-life version of Kungfu Panda.

I actually had high expectations from this one (because the premise was interesting) and maybe that’s why I’m so disappointed. I laughed only once or twice throughout the film, most other times I was cringing, or holding my head in my hands. The audience was 50-50, a few walking out in the interval, despite having paid Rs 260 per ticket and some others laughing everytime the director intended them to. They’re actually planning a sequel to this, but despite being set in Africa, a herd of wildebeest couldn’t drag me to that one…

Singh is Kinng

Rating : 5/10
Running Time : 136 Minutes
Release Date : 8th August ‘08
Director & writer : Anees Bazmee ; Music : Pritam
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Neha Dhupia, Om Puri, Kirron Kher, Ranvir Shorey, Sonu Sood, Javed Jaffrey, Yashpal Sharma

For those who like that kind of stuff, this is yet another mindless film masquerading as a comedy. And all the hype yet again reveals something very slapstick, very ordinary. The first half is not so bad, if you don’t mind a little slapstick and some very Punjabi humour. The second half just deteriorates into unnecessary weeping, melodrama and one implausible situation after another.

The plot, that of a do-gooder cum nuisance, Happy Singh, being sent to Australia to bring an ex-resident of the village and current Don, Lucky Singh, is already implausible to the extreme. The sub-plots, involving Katrina, Kirron Kher, Javed Jaffrey and the other members of Lucky’s gang stretch credibility even further.

Its not without its moments though…the lingo is very rustic Punjabi and raises a lot of laughs. ‘Chehra itna bhola, andar bam ka gola’ or ‘lady Bheem’ were both delightful descriptors of Katrina. Names like Happy, Lucky and Mika cannot belong to any other community in the world. Pankaj Uddas, with his mournful, morbid stories, was a very nice touch. Javed Jaffrey’s removal of all guns from his person was funny. And the scene in the second half, involving Lucky Singh on a wheelchair being used as a waiter, was absolutely hilarious.

However, there was a tendency to degenerate into slapstick (the film begins with the oldest slapstick routine in the book with Akshay chasing a hen through the streets of his village), the situations become more and more flimsy and I really didn’t understand the need to switch gears and become so emotional in the second half – it absolutely ruined the whole film. Katrina & Neha looked lovely through the film, Akshay holds his own and most people acted decently, except Ranvir, who looks out of sorts and a bit mis-cast. The music is a split between the good (the title song and Jee Karda), the ugly (the snoopy dogg song and ‘Talli hua’) and the ok (most others), though all songs were forced into the film


I’ve also not understood the recent trend of choosing another country just for exotic locales – when it was a rarity, like the tulip fields of Silsila or the Switzerland scenery in Darr, it worked. Now I really feel the locale should have something to do with the plot…I mean the Mummy, quite obviously, needed Egypt just as Crocodile Dundee needed Australia. Singh is Kinng needed neither yet we were treated to songs in Egypt and the rest of the movie ostensibly in Australia.

In some ways though, the movie is almost like an ad for Punjab and its delightful, over-sized, gregarious residents. I remember when a restaurant chain called ‘Punjabi by Nature’ opened up in Delhi and quickly established itself as an iconic Punjabi place with its vodka-shot gol gappa’s, oversized naan’s (pls never order 2) and tangy butter chicken. This movie has already, due to its title, established itself as an icon of all Sikh’s and has been parodied / used and re-used in news channels, normal conversations, posters, sms jokes etc. Its commercial success is almost assured. Pity though that the imaginative title and the lovely designer pagdi’s was followed by something so trite, so ordinary. Surely the kingly Singh’s of the world deserved better.