Tashan - The ‘pharmoola’

This piece does exactly what “Tashan” is… great stars, great styling, great songs and great visuals work as long as the script is great, the script is bits n piece from here n there with snippets of (some sort of) originality…..

A blood red Mercedes convertible racily advances through Ladakh's dusty terrain, the car radio nervously shuffles between AC/DC's Highway to Hell and Mukesh's rendition of Kabhi Kabhie.

A crazy fusion of everything desi and phoren -- style, soul and lingo. Welcome to debutant director Vijay Krishna Acharya's land of the English-challenged fashionably quirky, where Tashan is your passport to every conceivable absurdity and You-got-to-be-kidding brand of illogical twists step on your toes at every opportunity.

Then again, both the soundtrack and its promos, never really made any bones to hide that. Like, who expects meaningful cinema from a movie which parades its leading actors in outrageous blonde wigs, flashy attires; and on top of it, makes them do a power-packed jig, in the middle of nowhere, along with hundred other colourful extras?

And so Tashan is *exactly* what it looks like -- a silly spectacle which goes all out to entertain. Right from its sleek black & white graphic novel-inspired opening credits to fire-breathing gun-pipes charged at the villain or cycle-rickshaw chases in the dingy lanes of Kanpur, everything is ostensibly over-the-top.

Any other actor in Anil Kapoor's place would have hammed like mad in a role that spells g-a-u-d-y. Kapoor, however, conveys the English-obsessed temperament of his character with such utter seriousness, you really don't want to argue. Also, the man plays evil with equal relish.

First Impression is Last Impression, Anil Kapoor rocks…

Tashan is a good piece of entertainment. It does not boast of sensibility but its entertainment spelt with a big "E" and Anil Kapoor steals the thunder. Tashan works because of Anil Kapoor. He shows why he is such a great actor. I do not think anyone could do justice to the role of Bhayyaji other than Anil Kapoor.

Leave your brains out and watch Tashan, its a total entertainment and I could see that in the movie hall. Everytime "Bhayyaji-Anil Kapoor" came on the scene, the people were glued to the screen and sitting upstraight. Anil Kapoor makes Tashan watchable. He just shows the difference between Men and boys. Akshay and Saif just dont match him in his histronics.

Akshay Kumar, is of course, a complete thespian by now, and he lifts every scene that he’s in. His Ravan entry is phenomenal in comic scale, and kudos to the writers for his character. It’s Pande’s (and Bhaiyyaji’s to a certain extent ) mythological references in the movie that remind us of the constant parallels that 70s action movies were trying to emulate. Good guy versus bad guy, guru and shishya, damsel in distress. His take on the dehati is the perfect foil to Saif’s ‘cool dude’ Indian trying to be American, and gives some of the most thought-provoking nuggets about the value and pre-conceptions attached to English in India, and the prejudices that might invoke.

Tashan is a spoof… or is it?

That’s the question most of us kept asking after we walked out of the cinema hall. It is quite evident that the film was drawing upon a lot of Hindi movies.

There are some really funny moments too – like the part, which is very evidently a take-off on Don. The ACP tells Saif that he’s the only one in the police department who knows Saif is on their side… and gets killed in the very next frame.

But somehow, unlike Om Shanti Om, Tashan fails to strike the chord and instead goes off on a tangent. For instance, the film follows the ‘pharmoola’ of a con girl taking a guy for a ride and falling for him and then by introducing the childhood sweetheart track, falls for the very thing its spoofing.

Then again Javed Jaferi and Feroz Khan would toss and turn even in their grave at the way Tashan has used them.

India's multiplex's didn't release Tashan today, the proverbial Friday. And how bizarre - us NRI-log have now watched a major Indian release way before our desi counterparts.

Read Tashan ki tashan at Studio of Thoughts where you can find the The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly about the film….. it’s quite well done.

Ebrahim (Saif's son) makes his debut in Tashan, the kid is really cute and has lots of panache.

Here you can read the movie review by Taran Adarsh on indiafm.com