Movie Review: TEES MAAR KHAN (2010)

Apparently, Farah Khan can’t make movies about anything other than her own experiences in Bollywood. Actually, let me rephrase: Farah Khan can’t make movies. Her latest offering in TEES MAAR KHAN is another tongue in ass story that uses the whole ‘lets make a movie in a movie’ shtick, (something that Bollywood is starting to do TOO frequently by the way) but does it horribly.

Rating: 0 Out Of 5 Stars

TEES MAAR KHAN is the story of a tackily dressed, larger than life, repetitive one line spouting con-man’s biggest con in life. That con is basically to fool a village full of innocents, a famous Bollywood actor, his own mother, the cops and apparently the audience of the film, in order to steal a train load of valuables. That is honestly, the simplest way to describe the crap-a-palooza that took place on screen for 135 minutes.

Con films usually have awesome scams and schemes, and treat the cheating of people as an art. Each con film tends to outdo the films before its time, in terms of complexity and execution; from THE STING to OCEAN’S ELEVEN, each has sought to outdo the era before it. However, TEES MAAR KHAN seems to assume that the audience are just as big morons as the people being scammed in the film, which happens to be in the most ridiculous way.

Akshay Kumar portrays the title character who has to steal an entire train loaded with valuables that happen to be heavily guarded, for his employer. In order to get the train to stop, he decides to trick an entire village into believing that he is a world famous director, casting them all in his film about India’s Revolution against the British, the story of which requires ALL the villagers to stop, attack, then loot the train. To give credibility to this outrageous plan, he also manages to convince a leading superstar of Bollywood, portrayed by Akshaye Khanna (which is probably the only funny thing about the film) to act in his ‘film’ with promises of an Oscar winning performance. Add to that a hapless girlfriend (I think) who happens to an aspiring actress, who’s just glad to be able to put on makeup for a legitimate reason, although the only reason she needs is being awake.

The entire film hinges on the audience being able to suspend their disbelief SO much, as to be able to take seriously the fact that the bosses of Tees Maar Khan happen to be gaudily dressed conjoined bald twins. Yea, seriously.

Farah Khan’s last film was a great satirical and nostalgic look at the Bollywood industry back in the its hay day in the 70’s with OM SHANTI OM. It seems, that she can’t get over her own clumsy ability to tell stories that revolve around things connected to her own profession in the film industry. The whole concept of TMK pretending to be a director, with his moronic band of sidekicks, doing a lazy ass job of convincing villagers of their roles is really what I have the biggest problem with. It seems like the entire film just hopes that the lack of any attempt in execution, won’t be noticed, as long as they have zany deliveries, insane characters, stupid ass plot and Akshay Kumar. Because apparently that’s all you need these days in Bollywood to make a successful ‘comedy’.