Badmaash Company - POST ALL REVIEWS HERE - Page 10

Dollars stuffed in socks and collars. Three guys and a girl are carrying contraband cash to Bangkok at a time when you couldn't carry more than 500 dollars overseas, meaning this not so slick flick is set circa 1994. Whoa, this one's a period piece which you certainly shouldn't recommend to your kiddy nephew or niece. Because that foursome go wham-bam-scam till you're convinced that the Yashraj production is asserting that crime pays. Exit sweet romance, enter unchecked conmanship. Eeps.

Actor-turned-writer-director Parmeet Sethi makes his bow with Badmaash Company, toplining Shahid Kapoor in the role of a good-guy-turned-scamster. And of course, if the 'hero' becomes thoroughly debauched, forgets that element called 'conscience', and turns nasty with practically every human being, you can bet that eventually he'll turn over a new people leaf. Umm, if that reminds you of the same actor going through the same money-can't-buy-love rigmarole in Shikhar, so be it. After all what Bollywood calls 'the treatment' is different. Or is it?

If you can call it a change, it's mainly that backdrop of the '90s even if the airports and satellite channels depicted seem very 'today'. Vuitton label shirts and spiky hair-cuts don't belong to another era. In other words, the plot located in the last millennium rarely rings true if at all. Gall.

The screenplay which kicks off with the dollar smuggling, leapfrogs to the next successful trick pulled off by Cutie Boy-Man (Shahid Kapoor, natch), abetted by a friend with a Sadhana fringe (Vir Das), and Zing (Meiyeng Chang) from Sikkim who is constantly being called 'Chini'. Someone even comes up with a classic line, "Chinese have feelings too." Thank you for this Chini kum scoop really. For the female quotient, there's a mini-skirt (Anushka Sharma) who employs the f-word liberally (when she's fed up of saying eff-eff-eff), she opts for 'frigging'. Ewww.

More: The foursome cheat the Indian customs of duty for Reebok keds – how's that for surrogate advertising? Next, a New York bozo is inveigled into buying a consignment of leather gloves (all gloves to be worn on the right hand, and he wants the left too…greedy greedy). For a biggertime scam, an American bank is duped into sanctioning a bogus house loan. Groan. Mr U S Banker looks around nervously to convey that he's taken a cut. So had a smarmy customs agent earlier. Inicidentally, throughout this jeepers creepers caper, Cutie Good-Bad Hero is financially aided by his mamma, who describes a bimbette blonde as a 'casual' bhabhi. Entertaining?

No, just oppressive. Just when the white collar crime plot threatens to thicken some more, your Cutie Boy is slammed into jail. Six months later, he is released, looking fresher than a buncha daisies. He becomes a manual labourer in mamaji's factory, looks miserable, is determined to make his morose dad (Anupam Kher,typecast) forgive him, and accepts a cup of coffee from Lady Quotient who trills that she's pregnant. It's his kid, it seems. Whaaaaaatever.

Truly, the finale deserves all the awards in the world for being unintentionally howlarious. Without revealing it, suffice it to say it involves Michael Jackson wearing a Bleeding Madras shirt at one of his concerts. If you don't faint out of sheer shock, it's only because the 14-reeler is about to wind up anyway. Forget a smidgen of logic or reason, the screenplay exists in some kind of la-la-land, zipping between Mumbai, Las Vegas and New York. Air travel, you guess, must have been dirt-cheap in the '90s.

About the only sequence that works is the one with Shahid Kapoor letting off his pent-up anger at a restaurant. For a change it is written senstively and is marvellously performed by the actor. Kapoor is unquestionably gifted – spontaneous and with a likeable screen presence – but is let down here by the wobbly script. Anushka Sharma (when she isn't photographed in close-ups or those wink-wink, nudge-nudge kissing scenes) is feisty.

Of the supporting cast, neither Vir Das nor Meiyeng Chang are impressive. On the techfront, the cinematography is nothing to crow about. The editing mercifully closes several boring scenes quickly (like the one with a sobbing mum at the other end of the phone line). Pritam's music is serviceable. For one of the tracks, he rips off that pop chestnut Eye of the Tiger. Habits die hard maybe.

Honestly, this enterprise should have been more appropriately titled Boredmaash Company.