REVIEW: Badmaash Company

MONEY RULES

Parmeet Sethi’s directorial debut, Badmaash Company operates in a warped moral universe. Its principal characters, a bunch of four friends, start off as ‘carriers’ of smuggled goods from Bangkok, then graduate to slightly bigger scams of their own, move base to the US, get carried away by different vices and part ways on a sour note. The protagonist, Karan (Shahid Kapoor) comes back to India, to suddenly realise what the ‘izzat’ that his not-so-rich father (Anupam Kher) has been talking about intermittently (but in a rather muffled voice, I think) means, and goes back to the US to earn an honest living.

Now that his conscience has awakened, the writer-director feels the need to give him his redemption equally swiftly and on a platter. So he concocts a hair-brained scheme to help him get rich quick all over again, only this time through supposedly fair means (which include buying stocks of a company at dirt cheap prices based on insider information and then selling them for huge profits!). Bottom line – ‘izzat’ = lots of money, preferably well earned. That’s the sum total of Sethi’s understanding of the word, as portrayed in the film. But we must be grateful to him for even bringing it up, unlike Bunty Aur Babli (another Yashraj production) which relentlessly glorified its central characters’ dubious deeds and left them feeling bored, when they finally had to practice a routine life for even a short while.

The best thing about the film is its slick title sequence shot against various familiar sights in Bombay accompanied by a voiceover by Karan, who’s just out of college. The film is set in 1994, three years after the liberalisation policy was put into action, which puts a question mark over the premise of the customs scam, since liberalisation brought with it a drastic reduction in import duties. Also, very little attention has been paid to detailing life in Bombay 16 years ago and the treatment, language and ambience seem very contemporary.

As is often the case with Hindi cinema, the filmmaker is most at ease when the characters are playing cool scamsters, wearing fashionable clothes, singing, dancing and doing ‘ayyaashi’ (to which the film dedicates an entire song and much of its 2 hours 23 minutes length). As is the norm in Bollywood, large portions have been shot abroad at locations that now seem just as stale as the film’s plot.

One doesn’t expect great depth from mainstream commercial films. Still, characters need to be endearing for an audience to connect. Strangely, Karan turns out to be the least interesting of the lot. At least Bulbul (Anushka Sharma) comes across as a feisty young woman with a no-nonsense attitude. The other two friends played by Vir Das and Meiyang Chang are also quite affable. But there really isn’t a single compelling reason to spend good money on the weekend to watch Badmaash Company.