REVIEW: Badmaash Company (3)

FINALLY A WELCOME SUMMER BREAK FOR AUDIENCES

First a confession. If you are a style fiend, you will cringe at the clothes and shoes and sunglasses (so many of them!) that look great, but do not belong to the period the movie is set in. If you have traveled Air India in the 90s, you know they did not have blue blankets in cattle class, they have always used burgundy. I decided I will NOT look at styling in the movie after seeing the 2003 Takashi Murakami designed Multicolor Monogram Louis Vuitton shirt on Archie the smuggler in 1993/4.

Sigh. But the rest of us can sit back and enjoy a con movie that's not Ocean's Eleven, but it's not bad either. So Archie the smuggler recruits four graduates and takes them on a shopping trip to Bangkok. The smartest one (Shahid Kapoor, he's good, this lad) figures out how to get around the law and a poorly named Friends & Co is formed. Anushka Sharma is sassy and sharp Bulbul, Veer Das the stand-up comic is and adequate Chandu and Indian Idol hopeful Meiyang Chang is Zing (all right, considering the number of funny but harmless racist jokes are pulled at his expense).

For first time writer, director Parmeet Sethi, creating Archie the smuggler (wonderfully played by Jameel Khan) and Jas mamu (Pawan Malhotra, naturally brilliant) is an achievement. But the director falls for the safe 'good son gone bad and wants to redeem himself in the eyes of his parents' trap. The parent trap... sorry ...track drags the story down (Anupam Kher and Kiran Joneja). Stops the brilliant boy who can bend the law into a chap who calls his mama when things go wrong. Had he been a smart orphan (but for Jas Uncle in America) the story would have still worked, and we would have loved to see unabashed wickedness.

Well, the con bunch pull off a number of tricks, get rich and learn to celebrate. They have the swagger and the background score which is a great device and it works.We enjoy their success, because we wish we had thought of the cons ourselves. And then comes the downfall. Dosti turns into dushmani and it's Uncle Jas who brings them all back together. What fun. Shahid's Michael Jackson is great to watch. So is the film. Glad for YashRaj Studios. Hopefully this will end the bleak summer for our films.

Comments

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