Cinemaah

It’s Bad to be Clueless



In recent months, the attacks on Indians in Australia have been splashed over the media and created an atmosphere of fear and panic in the Indian community.  It was gratifying to see that a Bollywood film –Crook: It’s Good to be Bad--was made so quickly on the topical subject.

The anticipation soon turns to alarm when Mohit Suri comes up with a bizarre, totally unresearched film, and emerges with the theory that Indians are responsible for the attacks on themselves, because they refuse to assimilate.

A glowering Samarth (Arjan Bajwa) lives in Melbourne, but hates the Australians-- he talks of the superiority of Indian culture at the slightest provocation—his idea of culture being the of khap kind, where women have to be controlled.

His violent objection to his sister’s affair with a white Australian triggers off the whole race riot in Melbourne.  The film’s protagonist, Jai (Emraan Hashmi) running away from a criminal past in India, falls for Samarth’s other sister Suhani (Neha Sharma) and without wanting to, is drawn into taking a stand.

But what stand? Suri would be hard pressed to explain just what he is trying to say in a film, where Indians in Australia come across as an uneducated, boorish lot, many of them illegal immigrants; their attitude towards Australian women is shockingly crude.  So in the end, they deserve what’s coming to them.

Emraan Hashmi doesn’t look like he cared what the film was about and what he was doing in it.  He gets to romance an Indian girl and an Australian stripper, and that’s all he is called upon to do.  None of the other actors impress.  The issue of racism needed a much better film, not this half-baked mess.