Saturday, June 29, 2013
Ghanchakkar
Case of the Missing Loot
So, someone decides Vidya Balan should wear
bizarre outfits and play a loud Punjabi housewlfe with accent, and Emraan
Hashmi should play a befuddled, TV-addict Maharashtrian without accent and
small ponytail. That’s it... now find a story to fit these two characters.
Rajkumar Gupta whose short filmography
includes Aamir and No One Killed Jessica, tries his hand at a
comedy, but runs around a very small circle with a one-idea script. The man who was entrusted with the loot,
loses his memory and forgets where he stashed the suitcase. Funny...then? Then nothing.
Ghanchakkar doesn’t strain its
brain with logic or taking the plot to a credible end.
Sanju (Hashmi) is the “lazy lad” of the song,
whose face breaks into a grin only when a bigger TV is mentioned. Otherwise he
looks vaguely disgruntled with the wife Neetu (Balan), who dresses badly and
cooks worse. By Mumbai standards, they
live in a very large apartment, in a building with just one neighbour and no
domestic help, though it is revealed that Sanju, a retired safe cracker, has
made enough to live on comfortably for some years.
He is approached by two particularly ragged
crooks Pandit (Rajesh Sharma) and Idrees (Namit Das), with the offer of a big
bank heist that will net him ten crores.
For a bank that keeps 35 crores in its locker, the security is amazingly
lax. The thieves wear masks with actors’
faces (funny, this), and cover the cameras, but leave finger prints all over
the place. After the money is stolen, for some unfathomable reason, they decide
to leave it with Sanju for three months, trusting him not to skip town with it
all. No cops on the trail, no media attention, when such a large sum of money
is stolen.
Three months later, when it’s time to dig out
the booty, Sanju has no recollection of it. Pandit and Idrees camp at Sanju’s
house, gulp down food cooked by “bhabhiji” and stare down her low-cut
dress. For no reason but silly humour,
there is a phone sex scene with Idrees, who then proceeds to do the next few
shots indoors and out in his underwear, which is okay because the neighbourhood
is bereft of human habitation, but for that lone neighbour.
There are sporadic and little bursts of
humour, some red herrings, but zero tension as a harried Sanju runs about trying to trace
the money; when the climax to all this build up arrives, it is a big letdown.
The two crooks have their “conferences” on the late night local train, and
there is a running gag of Idrees bullying a simple man returning home with his
bag of vegetables, and one can’t but flinch at the cruelty of it.
The actors rise way above the careless, half-baked
script, and Ghanchakkar is at best a
‘timepass’ film which dithers between caper comedy and noir thriller, and
somewhere down the line, gives up trying to be anything but a rush to reveal to
an impatient audience just where the damned suitcase is hidden.
Labels: Cinemaah
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