A TALE OF TWO CITIES

- by Sunandita

Chennai thoda mazedaar, Mumbai puri bekar.

No, no, I was not comparing the two Metropolitan cities of India. That is, in a single sentence, my “experience” of the two recent big Bollywood releases – “Chennai Express” and “Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai-Dobaraa.”

I went to watch the SRK-Deepika Padukone starrer “Chennai Express” with zero expectations. I hated the trailers and it was just combination of two factors – that the film was running at a theater near my house and that I had nothing much to do that day – took me there.

Rahul (SRK) is a 40-year-old ‘halwai’ (sweetmeat seller) from Mumbai who is asked by his

grandmother to travel to Rameshwaram to immerse the ashes of his recently deceased grandfather. The hero boards the Chennai Express. However, in a hilarious DDLJ-spoof sequence, he not only helps a girl (Deepika) to get into the train but also pulls in four other heavily-built thick-mustached men. It turns out that the girl, Meena, daughter of a village don in Tamil Nadu, is fleeing an arranged marriage and the men are her cousin brothers, trying to take her back. From here, all plans of SRK, obviously, go haywire.

Chennai Express is a typical Rohit Shetty comedy, with smatterings of romance thrown in for the sake of Shah Rukh Khan. This is not for the viewers who want their films sensible and logical. Here the sky is very blue, grass is very green, all houses and villages are like picture postcards and the cars in the chase sequence are garish red and orange. But there are a quite a few funny moments, such as one when Deepika asks SRK “are you 50?” As he tries to protest, she very sincerely continues, “Oh, that means you are older than that”!

SRK looks really old and tries too hard, but somehow succeeds to infuse comedy in some scenes. Deepika is comfortable and confident, sometimes outshining the senior actor. 

Songs are okay. “Titli” is nice, “1 2 3 4 Get on the Dance Floor” and “Lungi Dance” will be played in discs for some months before being forgotten.

Flip Side: The duration of the movie is too long. It could have been at least an hour shorter. And much ‘golmal’ is created by long Tamil dialogues. Sometimes, they are translated by other actors but sometimes they just go on and on confusing non-Tamil viewers. Up to a point, it’s okay. But after that it seems irritating.

The other movie, which was released a week after “Chennai Express”, is a sequel to the much-feted “Once Upon A Time in Mumbai”. In place of Emraan Hashmi, Akshay Kumar comes to play the dark and dangerous Shoaib. Imran Khan is the right-hand man of the evil don, tied to him in a deep bond of loyalty because he was rescued from the gutters by the “bada aadmi”.

Enters the demure damsel Sonakshi and by a cruel turn of fate both the bada don and the chhota don fall in love with her.

What follows is a confusion prolonged for two hours and 40 minutes. It is not clear whether the director wanted to make a love triangle, an action movie or a gangsta’ flick. It tries to be all three and ends up being none.

Akshay seems to be enjoying playing the villain and tried to salvage the weak screenplay. But even he could not do much in a story which wanted him to swing between the extremely suave, dangerous and cruel don and the love letter-writing ‘ashiq’.  Imran Khan looks misfit. Sonakshi Sinha is okay except in the high-pitched last scene. “Yeh Tune Kya kiya” is a song I hummed all along my way back home but rest are forgettable. Dialogues are too long and convoluted.

Flip Side: The high expectation with which you approach this movie after the gripping prequel which had taken evil-versus-lesser-evil drama to a new high. Even Chennai Express is brainless, but at least it does not pretend to be realistic.

Disclaimer: This is not a professional review of the two films. This is my personal view about the movies. You can go and watch them and forge your own view. :D