Tees Maar Khan

Producer: Shirish Kunder, Ronnie Screwvala, Twinkle Khanna
Director: Farah Khan
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Akshaye Khanna, Katrina Kaif, Raghu Ram, Rajiv Laxman and Arya Babbar
Music: Vishal-Shekhar, Shirish Kunder
Lyrics: Shirish Kunder, Vishal Dadlani, Anvita Dutt Guptan
Film Released on: 24 December 2011

I’ve always been a fan of Manmohan Desai cinema, Farah Khan’s unapologetic masala outings and Akshay Kumar. Farah Khan’s stories have been shamelessly commercial and mass-driven the screenplays (by Khan and Abbas Tyrewala for Main Hoon Na, and Khan, Mayur Puri and Mushtaq Sheikh for Om Shanti Om) have been smartly written for universal acceptance and a hundred percent entertainment guarantee that has worked for both her films, thus ensuring a blockbuster status for them. And now, she’s back with Tees Maar Khan, a film that has been penned by her husband and editor Shirish Kunder, who has previously written and directed Jaan-E-Mann, which is yet another movie I’ve loved for its sheer honesty.

The film has a lot going for it, honestly. Sheila Ki Jawaani, Farah Khan, eye-catching promos and there you have it. It is the first film Farah Khan’s doing without Shah Rukh Khan and his production company, thereby starting her own home production with Shirish Kunder. Instead, she signs Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif in lead roles, the latter's pairing with Kumar has always been a successful and compatible one on-screen.

But sometimes, when all looks good from the outside, it can deceive. Let me appropriately add here Farah Khan and Shirish Kunder have been bigger conmen than the title character they’ve created because they’ve presented to us a shiny exterior, but when we dig deeper we find nothing at all. This paragraph should be dedicated to the description of the synopsis of the story of this film, but it’s very unfortunate I find it difficult to summarize the story here because the movie has none. Even so, I’ll try.

There’s a certain guy called Tabrez Mirza Khan (played by Akshay Kumar in his most annoying avatar ever donned so far) who calls himself Tees Maar Khan and lives with his three stupid sidekicks who are even more annoying. He has a girlfriend Anya who does item numbers like Sheila Ki Jawaani for B-Grade films. His mother thinks he’s a filmmaker. He does a few heists and then starts dancing to Wallah Re Wallah and Salman Khan comes to dance too for no apparent reason. He goes to a village to do a final heist and dons the avatar of a filmmaker here when he lands in a village. He makes a film starring his girlfriend and Aatish Kapoor (Akshaye Khanna, and can someone tell him, Please stop screaming) with the heist hiding under an innocent scene shoot. In the middle there’s another song and by the end you just end up pulling your hair as a better measure to pass your time because you know you’ve paid for the tickets and you’ve got to try and milk the worth out of it.

No, the problem is not in Farah Khan’s direction. It’s the writing that’s highly faulty. Kunder fails miserably here. The dialogues are pathetic as hell, and the scenes just don’t have any logic whatsoever. People who might have liked the film – highly unlikely though – will argue that I’m trying to act intellectual, but I’ve loved films like Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Sholay, Main Hoon Na, Om Shanti Om, Wanted, Dabangg and the Golmaal franchise. But this was the limit to all buffoonery the audience can resist or tolerate.

The first fifteen to twenty minutes manage to grab your attention somehow, but the rest of the film continues to degrade itself till it reaches a point of over-exaggeration no one can handle. Farah Khan has executed the screenplay barely well. The songs have been amazingly choreographed and shot but apart from Sheila ki Jawaani, which appears in those good fifteen minutes, the rest of the songs really don’t hold any interest due to the extremely annoying reels that follow. Cinematography is good, but does one pay any attention to how beautiful the frame looks when all you want to do is run out of the hall you’re trapped in?

Editing by Kunder is a joke as three-fourths of the film should have been chopped off. Music by Vishal-Shekhar is not as good as their previous outings this year and Farah Khan’s own Om Shanti Om. Shirish Kunder’s title track is fun and foot tapping but doesn’t make the movie any better. Sheila Ki Jawaani is my pick and Vishal Dadlani’s cameo as the lust-ridden director of the song is one of the couple of hilarious things in the film. Camerawork is neat.

Performances wise, Akshay Kumar does a pathetic job, though if looked at in a way, it isn’t his fault he acted so bad, because of the cheesy script. Katrina Kaif is (surprisingly) one who makes the people laugh intentionally. Her upper-lip styled “Bachao's" with random repetitions of “You dirty dog” whenever, will end up making you smile if not crack up. Her bimbo act, however unrelated to the story, ends up being a silver lining in the cloud of a script.

Akshay Khanna made me cry; not at how amazing his performance was, but at the fact that such a gifted performer chose such a hideous role like this. Raghu Ram doesn’t deserve anything to say. I saw some promise in him with his act in Jhootha Hi Sahi but I just don’t feel like commenting about them here. Sachin Khedkar is another shocking waste of a performer here. We all know what he’s capable of but here, the less said the better. Others are okay, considering the script was so bad anyway.