Badmaash Company - POST ALL REVIEWS HERE - Page 8

Insulting audiences with 'Housefull' and 'Badmash Company' on consecutive weekends threatens to split the lucrative, undiscriminating dumb-ass demographic.

Director Parmeet Sethi has said that he wrote 'Badmash Company' in just 6 days. He was obviously lying. The film gives the impression that Mr Sethi was just making it up as he was filming, with little or no regard for the audience's intelligence. Make no mistake, 'Badmash Company' is the umpteenth summer skinny dip in Yash Raj's putrid pond of retread action-thriller-musical twaddle. Its all shrill, convoluted and boring, and it sinks in a sea of interminable chases and con gobbledygook. Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult - it's so noisy that you can hear it in the next town; staying interested is something else entirely. Thanks to this insipid product, audiences now have a new simile to hoot over - 'amateurishly uneven like a Parmeet Sethi film, and loudly stupid like a Yash Raj film'.

In 'Badmash Company' a bunch of dudes plan on going against the system and making quick money. If this theme were any more familiar you could buy it a bouquet and take it to a dinner date. Call me a victim of cultural brainwashing, but even the audience snickered at the idea of Anushka Sharma conning Manhattan police. The key to conning, as I understand it, is NOT sticking out like a sore thumb. There are the usual glossy foreign locales, montage of scenes with the foursome popping open bottles of champagne, indulging in all kinds of debauchery, parading about in expensive clothes. And in a shocking twist that you'd never see coming they turn against each other. After nearly two and a half hours, it all mercifully ends, leaving the viewer to ponder all the ways that dozens of crores of rupees might have been better spent. Maybe one would have liked 'Badmash Company' better ten years ago, when overproduced co(r)n films were simply stale instead of downright moldy.

Not enough can be said about the intermittently hamming and flat Wooden Leading Man Shahid Kapoor, with his frustratingly self-righteous demeanor, his pursed lips, and eyebrows that seem to have a life of their own. Parmeet Sethi unfortunately did not have access to the horse tranquilizers that Vishal Bharadwaj administered to Shahid while filming 'Kaminey'. Anushka Sharma puts the 'Bad' in 'Badmash' - her vacant-faced, anorexic, midriff-baring Bulbul exists to make sure you know Shahid Kapoor's Karan is heterosexual - useful in a leader of a pack of men on their own. Anushka and Shahid's pairing does sound promising in theory, but their lack of chemistry makes Dhruv Ganesh and Shraddha Kapoor in 'Teen Patti' look like old, familiar vaudeville partners. Meiyang Chang's Zing has no zing while Vir Das' Chandu is practically nonexistent.

Final verdict? 'Badmash Company' is predictably soulless Bollywood tripe, it is thoroughly and maddeningly obtuse. Shelling out Rs 500+ at your nearest multiplex for this sorry excuse of a film would render one of its songs into your life. It goes by the name of 'Fakira'.