Movie: Entertainment
Director: Sajid-Farhad
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Tamannah Bhatia, Sonu Sood, Johnny Lever, Krishna Abhishek, Prakash Raj
Rating: **
When dialog writers turn directors, they do justice to their strengths on paper but not its execution on screen as much. Except for the likes of Gulzar and Vishal Bharadwaj who’ve proved it otherwise, the past doesn’t offer you with many successful transitions. Entertainment has the duo of Sajid-Farhad, the writers for Rohit Shetty’s and Sajid Khan’s earlier films weave a few comic escapades in place of a plot. The inspirations are for you to see within five minutes into the narrative. You aren’t motivated to think much when a will declares a dog named Entertainment to be the next heir to a vast empire and the big money connects Akshay, Tamanna, Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood in a nuisance-adoring setting. The laughs are for the exaggerated episodes where subtle humor appears to be residing on a different planet.
The heroine is objectified to suffice the aesthetic quotient to an extent of Sonu Sood describing her physicality like a voyeur. Masala films can also be engaging when the girl has a life beyond the man of her dreams and dances to his tunes. But, is the crew behind the 100-crore – intentioned films ready to listen ? The commercial results don’t permit them to fiddle with it. Skimpy costumes and dream sequences are all what she is bound to get as Tamanna is similarly stuck in her third Hindi film that cares the least to give her any worthy screen-space.
Akshay Kumar still wants those Khiladi days by his side at his mid 40′s. Although films like Boss and Holiday weren’t extravagant attempts to showcase his youthful virility, he wasn’t being the desperate actor hiding his facial layers. The problem with Akshay Kumar and this film are the do-it-all-no matter-what treatment. If it was trying to be the silly comic caper that the first half explored to good effect, the film could have been exactly escapist, as opposed to the tone changes later. With enough suggestions at the interval bang, the movie marches into a melodramatic territory. The same director who didn’t mind taking a dig at the existence of a dog gives lectures about their faithfulness. The dog’s character from a usual Bollywood film transforms into a Marley and Me mode.
It’s in fact better than Sajid Khan’s meek surrender to the formulaic madness. There are hints of the method getting right such as the video parlour of Akshay Kumar’s buddy that’s labelled Mere Paas Cinemaa Hai and his cinematic utterances backed by the mockery of daily soaps in Tamanna’s character sketch. Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood are reduced to villainous clowns time and again. There’s nothing to reinvent or improvise with their parts. Hindi films by now have got habituated to glamorise sexist gestures with large budgets. Neither entertainment nor intelligence at store but only the admission of fooling themselves and the audiences. Fall for this when you only want more of bikinis, buffoons, tracks wanting you to have a bottle of beer to celebrate life.
Review by Srivathsan N. First published in Cinegoer.net
