REVIEW: Khatta Meetha

NOISE POLLUTION

Early in Priyadarshan's Khatta Meetha, Akshay Kumar's Sachin Tichkule says, "Ek baar shuru hota hoon to khatam nahin hota. Bas doobta hi jaata hoon." A bit like the film itself, which starts off on a reasonably promising note, only to disintegrate beyond comprehension as the plot meanders aimlessly and characters' scream at each other instead of talking in a civilised manner. Tichkule is a road contractor in Phaltan, Satara, who can't execute contracts properly and keeps borrowing money from every source possible to survive. He lives in a sprawling old mansion with his family (we are give to believe they are descendants of royalty, though it's quite a stretch on the imagination) and is the bete noire of the house.  

While his father is a retired judge (Kulbhushan Kharbanda, with a chaste Punjabi accent as Tichkule sr.) and his mother a weepy housewife (Aroona Irani, who, for some reason doesn't have a kitchen and hence cooks in the courtyard, with old brass containers functioning as props in the art direction), his brother and two brothers-in-law form an unholy trinity of builder, contractor and municipal engineer, grabbing deals through dubious means and executing them shoddily. Needless to say the local politician and fixer are also involved. Something we've grown up watching in Hindi cinema and hence entirely out-dated, even though corruption continues to grow relentlessly. 

Now Tichkule doesn't mind being corrupt himself, except, he just can't do a good job of it. Meanwhile a bridge the trinity have constructed with poor materials collapses and a bus full of people die (remember Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, before which there was Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron? Bollywood has a long history of falling bridges). Mr. Fixer comes up with the brilliant plan of making a poor old driver the scapegoat, and up to this point, the plot at least has a semblance of coherence. 

The middle of the film stretches forever involving sad gags by Priyadarshan regulars -- Asrani, Neeraj Vora, Rajpal Yadav and finally Johnny Lever, who grates on the nerves just like the road-roller he's been summoned to repair. There's also a real elephant which eventually pulls the said road-roller and seems to have been blurred to give the illusion of being computer generated to keep animal activists at bay. 

Then comes a hugely unconvincing love story featuring Tichkule and Gehna Ganpule (Trisha). Halfway through the film, Gehna shows up as the town's municipal commissioner and gets into inane verbal duels with Tichkule before cutting to a bizarre flashback that sends Akshay Kumar back to college as an idealistic law student. And all through this bloated segment, the collapsed bridge and its victims are forgotten, only to be revived towards the end as a bereaved husband and father (Makrand Deshpande) decides to expose the bad guys. Tichkule's sister (Urvashi Sharma) is married off to Mr. Fixer. She either commits suicide or is bumped off, while Gehna too attempts to kill herself (which is basically what women do, other than cooking and crying).

There are two things about Khatta Meetha even more distasteful than the film itself. First, that it borrowed its title from a genuinely warm-hearted Basu Chatterjee comedy and second, that its makers shamelessly exploited an ailing R K Laxman, the creator of the 'common man' series, to promote this shoddy mess. And perhaps even more that Akshay Kumar makes crores and crores of rupees featuring in such embarrassingly poor fare and Priyadarshan continues to make two films every year, even though no one can remember the last time he did anything noteworthy.