Director: Farah Khan
Cast Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Akshaye Khanna
Rating*1/2
Movie Review: Tees Maar Khan Five minutes into the film, and I wanted to flee. At which point I decided to suspend every single critical faculty, lie back, and see where ‘Tees Maar Khan’ took me. And I am here to report that it propelled me to a place where I had to search long and hard for my brains, them having been bludgeoned into submission by an unending onslaught of puerile gags and harebrained characters defined by their stunningly slim lines, not too many and not too tough : this is not a film, you can tell quite quickly, which has a long and complicated script.
So everyone in the film is instructed to call Akshay Tees Maar Khan. Including Akshay himself, just in case he forgets who he is, even if he’s the kind of crack thief that can get his handcuffs off in a second. His big task in the film is to loot money off a train, manned by a bunch of bumbling cops. He is helped by his trio of sidekicks, a knock-out bimbette ( Kaif), an Oscar-crazy hero ( Khanna) and a whole posse of villagers. And a couple of star turns by Salman Khan ( all the better to make Kat jokes) and Anil Kapoor ( who else can be made the butt of Oscar jokes?).
This kind of madcap plot where everything ( and everyone) is stirred together till the masala is just right is what Farah Khan did so well in ‘ Main Hoon Na’, and most of ‘Om Shanti Om’. Her unapologetic Bollywood shtick and her large star-studded dance ensembles made both those films complete entertainers : I can happily see ‘Put you hands in the air’, from `OSO’ in a loop. ‘Tees Maar Khan’ could been a corker because it’s taken off from the 1966 ‘After The Fox’, a great Peter Sellers farce. But it is hobbled by poor, tasteless writing, and a leading man who seems to have lost his sense of comic timing.
The two people who help you make it through, just about, are Akshaye Khanna and Katrina Kaif. The former plays a top star desperate for an Oscar, dying every time he sees the famous Anil Kapoor ( post the ‘Slumdog’ win) jig on TV. The latter is an item girl who plays silly with such abandon, you can’t help smiling, not even in that Shake It Till It Drops Sheila Item Number, which, pssst, comes very soon after the film opens. ‘Tees Maar Khan’ will go down as the movie which got her to Kaif to say ‘lakhtey jigar’. No, really. And when she goes` nahiiiiiiin’, in classic Hindi filmy heroine pose, she makes you laugh.
The rest of it is wince-making.
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