REVIEW: Khatta Meetha (3)

BITTER PILL

It’s obvious that Priyadarshan picked up an old Malayalam film and recycled it into Khatta Meetha. His films usually exist in some weird la la land, where people live in distinctly Malayalam homes, have Maharashtrian surnames and speak in Hindi. Sometimes one of them, like Maalamaal Weekly work, but this one is scraping the bottom of the barrel, even for a conveyor belt director like him.

It would be tough to say what Khatta Meetha is about. The protagonist Sachin Tichkule (Akshay Kumar) is a loser. He tries to make a go of a business of road building, but is faced with corruption all the way, and no support from his villainous brothers and caustic father.

It’s not even as if the film does a good job of exposing corruption— despite the device of planting Sachin’s old flame Gehna (Trisha) as a municipal commissioner, who is opposed to his ways. The script fans out into dozens of directions and just never reaches anywhere. There is a mildly amusing sub-plot of Sachin winning a decrepit road roller from the municipal corporation, but that is abandoned summarily. There is another subplot of a bridge that falls down and kills people, but that leaves no impact either.

What happens over most of the film is that Sachin yells at the top of his lungs at a variety of people—his workers, government officials, his family—and they yell back equally loud. The film is supposed to be a comedy, not a yelling match; if it were, Manoj Joshi would have won the gold medal. In between, at random points, there are song and dance breaks.

Even his worst films were not so slapdash; this one seems like Priyadarshan was deliberately trying to make a flop, and Akshay Kumar walked into the trap. Common Man indeed! How many common men do we know, who walk about with file, pouch, umbrella and aviator glasses at all times!