Cinemaah

Overdone Farce


Her first two films Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om established Farah Khan as a director with spirit and a sense of humour uniquely her own.  But by the time she comes to her third film, her Bollywood spoofiness is running thin.

Based on Vittorio de Sica’s Peter Sellers-starrer After the Fox,  which had a script by Neil Simon, the uproarious comedy that is created when con man recruits an aging star and organizes a fake shoot to pull off a heist, is turned into a overdone, noisy farce in Tees Maar Khan.

In a plodding overture, an animated infant in his mother’s  (Apara Mehta) womb, learns all about crime when she spends her time watching crime films.  He grows up into a con man Tabrez, also known as Tees Maar Khan. He has three annoying sidekicks, and an item dancer girlfriend Anya (Katrina Kaif).

He is hired by a pair of conjoined twins (Rajiv Laxman-Raghu Ram) to steal a fortune in antiques from a train transporting the treasure. He hits upon the idea of the fake shooting, masquerades as Hollywood director Manoj Day Ramalan, and offers the lead role to star Atish Kapoor (Akshaye Khanna), pining for an Oscar.

The shoot is arranged in out of the way Dhulia and all the villagers involved in the heist.  The first half is still amusing, but the shooting portion in the village is just not funny.  Humour always works better when everybody is not shouting ‘Look Look, ain’t I hilarious!’ and in this film everyone from the lead pair to minor characters like a pair of gay cops overacts; the costumes and sets are garish.  The casual, throwaway lines and gags that Farah Khan sprinkled so lightly on her earlier films, is replaced by a heavy-handedness that is most unappealing.

If a film needs to boost itself on the lead actresses ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ item number, it is obviously short of inspiration.  From Farah Khan it is a letdown, mainly because one expected better from her.