Tashan Review

Here's a review of the recently released Big-Budget Bollywood film Tashan, originally published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 18, Dated May 10, 2008
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OVERSEXED, UNDERAGED
These Bollywood big-budget affairs like Tashan can't distinguish film scenes from their spoofs at award ceremonies, writes THANI



TASHAN’S WRITER-DIRECTOR Vijay Krishna Acharya says, “Writer F Scott Fitzgerald once said, ‘You don’t write to say something; you write when you have something to say.’ I am a staunch believer in those words.” While Acharya seems to have done terrible justice to the craft of writing with the Dhoom films, here he does much superior injustice to direction. Bad writing begets bad films.

Saif Ali Khan plays a call centre accent-trainer who’s hired to work on gangster Anil Kapoor’s English. Kareena Kapoor plays Anil Kapoor’s secretary of sorts, who first traps Saif in love, then elopes with 25 crores of Anil Kapoor’s booty. This particular predicament, necessitates the existence of Akshay Kumar’s wannabe shooter who’s hired to recover stolen money from the lassie-on-the-run. Akshay’s bait-cum-guide on the road trip is Saif, who naively made plans with the femme fatale. Fair enough. Interesting even, for a film’s premise. But it is the indifferent manner in which Tashan’s makers go about the same that renders it terribly irritating.

Soon enough, the twosome of Saif and Akshay find Kareena and bond-into a threesome over the course of a ridiculous goof-ball journey before they eventually are ready to smokeout baddie Anil Kapoor, if only to redeem their own bad lives.



A particularly tasteless sequence from Tashan has Kareena Kapoor teasing Akshay Kumar’s Kanpur-thug by making him dry her undergarments, and subsequently getting Saif ’s accent-trainer to playact a rape of herself. All this, and an extended song and dance too, transpire as the stars appear in various stages of undress.

Bollywood, when it comes to representation of sex, continues to be like an over-sexed kid with an underaged demeanor — awkward, fearful, vulgar, guilty and covert. These Bollywood big-budget affairs can’t seem to distinguish film scenes from their spoofs at award ceremonies.



Watching Tashan is like watching Tashan, its sequel, and its prequel — all three films poorly written, executed and enacted. Tashan culminates with an overlong action sequence picturised on sets straight out of Roberto Rodrigues’ Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The sequel, Tashan 2, is about recovering money for the baddie, even though the idea seems to have been finishing him off. And the prequel, Tashan 3, consists of Akshay’s and Kareena’s teenage love story, in anonymity.

Akshay Kumar’s brief seems to have been to act like Akshay Kumar as portrayed by Southern star Vikram; Saif ’s to play Saif from the previous decade; Anil Kapoor’s to emulate Amitabh Bachchan from Aag, and Kareena’s to continue acting like her look-alikes, Paris Hilton and Dani Woodward.


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