It begins with mud, Shah Rukh Khan's nipples and a lot of water droplets. Then director Farah Khan gives us a glimpse of how her brother Sajid directs films (by cracking bad jokes, offending people and using women). Cut to Cusrow Baug, where sex-starved Parsi ladies lust after the one non-senile specimen of masculinity in their 'hood.
This is how Farah Khan eases us into Happy New Year, a film about a dance competition and a jewellery heist. Velvet jackets show up. Chests are regularly bared. There's gold and more gold and even more gold. The colours, whether in make-up or furnishings, are lurid. The songs are synthetic cacophony. In short, HNY will claim three and a half hours of your life and by the end of it, you will feel older, blinded and deafer while Shah Rukh Khan will be richer. Happy Diwali, everyone.
The best part of HNY comes at the end. When the end credits roll, the different off-screen departments participate in the Worst Dance Championship, judged by Khan herself. From producer Gauri Khan to the spot boys, everyone busts a couple of moves in this WDC. It's a joy to watch because it's simple, unaffected and fun. (The camera unit won the award, in case you were wondering, and they really were delightfully bad.)
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the other WDC in HNY. WDC stands for World Dance Championship, held in Dubai in the film. This is a dance championship like no other. For one, its reigning champion is – wait for it – North Korea.
Leading the Indian contingent at WDC is Shah Rukh Khan as Charlie, a Boston university topper who is also a mud wrestler and a jewel thief with previous work experience as a construction worker. He appears to have a lingering sore throat, judging from how raspy Charlie sounds for most of HNY. We can only surmise that Vicks was supposed to be one of the brands featured in the film but the deal fell through at the last minute.
The deal that didn't fall through is the one with Atlantis, The Palm, in Dubai, which is a real hotel. In Happy New Year, it appears to be owned by Charan Grover (Jackie Shroff), an evil magnate with fabulous salt and pepper hair that deserves to be in a shampoo advertisement. Atlantis is where the WDC is being held and it's also the venue for an exhibition of priceless diamonds. This five-star resort has 1539 rooms, as Charlie informs us at one point. It also has a water park with dolphins and some seriously inept security because Charlie and gang go around discussing their plans to steal the diamonds all over the property without raising a single alert.
In the past, Farah Khan has shown that she can take the flimsiest of stories and turn them into feelgood entertainers like Om Shanti Om and Main Hoon Na. In contrast, HNY is an example of how the desperation to make a blockbuster film can suck the joy out of a film.
Khan ignores both story and characterisation, choosing to focus on tacky spectacle, Sonu Sood and Shah Rukh's bare chests and Shah Rukh's star status because she figures that's what the bulk of the audience will pay to see. Since HNY is the first big release in weeks and it will face no real competition until mid-November, the film will make money, but it will be interesting to see if HNY ends up going the Ra.One way.
Technically, HNY is Step Up meets Ocean's Eleven. Instead of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and gang, we get Shah Rukh, Deepika Padukone, Sonu Sood, Boman Irani, Vivaan Shah and Abhishek Bachchan in a script that is like a jenga tower of illogic and cringe-inducing details.
For instance, why are Charlie and a North Korean beating each other up in the middle of a dance competition while "Kung Fu Fighting” plays in the background? There's an entire sequence in an elevator in which no one says anything but everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts, thus revealing that Charlie and gang are telepaths in addition to their myriad talents which include vomiting at will (Bachchan as Nandu) and being able to shoot steam from one ear (Sood as Jag). At one point, Charlie says that Dubai, unlike India, serves real and swift justice for criminals, thus implying Dubai's Sharia law is fairer than the Indian system legal system with its reliance on silly things like common law, evidence, court trials etc.
Padukone, Irani, Shah, Sood and Bachchan are not just wasted as actors, but also straitjacketed in roles that are caricatures to the point of being offensive. This is particular true of Irani, who plays a Parsi with an idiotic accent, and Padukone, whose Mohini makes the airheaded heroines of '80s' movies seem like feminist icons. The ones who will really enjoy Padukone's appearances in HNY are those who work in Bombay Times, particularly when Mohini falls in love with Charlie as he describes her "booty” and how "breast-taking” she is.
One presumes the pay packets and promise of being in a film that is a sure-shot blockbuster are good reasons for actors to sign up for the explosion of tasteless stupidity that is HNY. However, this doesn't explain Anurag Kashyap's cameo. In the HNY universe, Kashyap is Vishal Dadlani's lover and they have a "sex tape” that shows Kashyap and a corset-clad Dadlani dancing with each other, wearing feather boas. It's difficult to decide which possibility is more depressing – that Kashyap thinks this is genuinely funny or that the director is so desperate to belong to the Big Boys' Club of Bollywood that he'll sacrifice personal dignity to this extent.
Like the Kashyap-Dadlani gag, there are countless cringe-inducing jokes in HNY. The only one not caricatured in the script is Shah Rukh, who unwittingly turns himself into a pathetic joke by referencing past films (just as he had in Chennai Express) and reminding audiences that he's not the hero he used to be.
In HNY, Shah Rukh displays none of the charms that made him a star. The film is one of the most idiotic he's made and this is one of the worst performances in the actor's career. He can't get even a snap of chemistry going with Padukone in the limp and listless love story of HNY. His action sequences are laboured and Khan had more comic scenes in Ra.One, which should be some indication of how humorless HNY is.
What we do get, however, is a gigantic silhouette of Shah Rukh Khan against the Indian tricolor, larger than life and a shadow of himself, towering over the audience like Christ the Redeemer does over the city of Rio de Janeiro. You may kneel, if you're so inclined. This reviewer, on the other hand, had keeled over by then.
--- FirstPOST
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