Random Expressions

There is absolutely no harm in showing attitude. This year’s top hit Race had oodles of it. Problem happens when there is no substance to support the style. Tashan - like Musafir - fails because the sexy swaggers and svelte styles has no back up in sense of script or soul. Leave soul aside, it even eschews a coherent story-line.

There is also no harm in simulating the seventies/eighties drama and melodrama and package it to suit the current sensibilities. After all, a sizeable audience slice still lives in the hinterland who feel alienated from the current trends. And dammit, we - the generation born in seventies - are not dead or transported to some other planet. We live too! So why not give us once in a while the kind of films we grew up with!

Farah Khan has delivered two bumper hits - Mai Hoon Na (a film I hated) and Om Shanti Om ( a flick I enjoyed) - keeping all those ingredients of the past painstakingly preserved ( in MHN, when the mother sobs in the climax, ‘ Mujhe mere dono bete zinda chahiye’ it was such a shining harkback to Nirupa Roy’s motherhood that wetted many a screens in the seventies) but gloriously packaged. There is a way of doing things and conjoining the two largely differing eras. There are films and then there are films. While OSO showed how to do it, Tashan spells out how not to do it!

Tashan is essentially a seventies/eighties film crash-landed into the new millenium and just doesn’t know what it really wants to be!

Tashan carries strong traits of the seventies/eighties film - a dash of anger, a dose of romance, a bit of melodrama, some comedy, full-on songs (completely lip-sync-ed), characters that essentially have no locus-standii or rooted to any connectible reality, lost-and-found childhood lovers, an elaborate dishum-dishum climax & a larger-than-life hideous villain!

But the director (Vijay Acharya) simply forgot that when Manmohan Desai strung together all this, he topped it off with a congrous narration and perhaps just that bit of magic, which makes the viewers of that generation still fondly remember those 70 mm creations!

I’ll not dwell on the story, because one can’t dwell too much on vacuum. I can’t even really comment on the script, because it so shamelessly meanders that it would make a jaywalking drunkard look like a marching army leiutenant!

I’ll come straight to the performances - Anil Kapoor aggrieves and irritates and does not just get on your nerves, he nauseously tramples upon it and then sadistically rubs salt over it. What starts off as an interesting character, with his faux English and garish elaboration, is - within a few reels - converted into a torture factory. Didn’t someone inform the director that over-dose of anything is dangerous? It hurt more because Kapoor is one of my favorite stars, and to see him go through this crass caricature pained.

Kareena looks good and performs pretty adequately (given the feeble script), and her flourescent bikini definitely adds brilliance. Saif is just about average - the same, basically - a non-serious flirt, naughty- yet- good at heart bloke. Haven’t we seen him do all this in Tara Rum Pum, Salaam Namaste, et al before? And psst, here’s a secret - the two are not exactly paired together, so all that pre-release hype of their first film two-gether (after their pair started), was well…just a hype!

Finally, we come to Akshay Kumar - the sole saving grace! If it hadn’t been for him, the film would have been a total washout. In fact, his portions in the second half are the film’s key highlights and the most interesting, entertaining and enjoyable parts.

Yeah, of course, the second highlight is Vishal-Shekhar’s super music . I am still hooked on to Dil dance maare, and even though it looked forced into the script, it was pretty good to see as well. In fact, full marks to Acharya for the song picturizations (with inspired choreography).

The film moves over one exotic locale to other - from the breathtakingly expansive Leh/Ladakh to the dreamy Kerala backwaters to the no-nonsense Mumbai streets to the sweeping Rajasthani sand-dunes to the clutter of Kanpur and the Ganga-washed ghats of Haridwar, with the occasional detour into the archaic cobbled Greek streets and crisp blue Hellenic Medittaranean shores. The cinematographer deserves kudos for his outstanding work in capturing the beauties from such a diverse back-drop.

In totality, it is a very disappointing Yash Raj Films - even though last year their films weren’t really burning up the chart, still the content was pretty interesting (barring, perhaps, Laga Chunri Mein Daag, I actually enjoyed all the others - including Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which I discovered I relished better in second viewing).

Sadly, Tashan is a deserved flop!

Overall - Avoid

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.