HAPPY NEW YEAR

Director Farah Khan’s Happy New Year is one of those typical Bollywood flicks that breeds on our special ability to appreciate non-sensical cinema and accept its gay abandonment of logic just because our favorite star endorses the film. If you manage to leave-your-brain-home and are desperate for cinematic therapy, then its brash humor (that the makers have leveraged upon too far certain times), is worthwhile your time.Charlie (Shah Rukh Khan), a self proclaimed loser, builds up his team of ‘losers’ to rob diamonds from a safe in Dubai in order to avenge the death of his father from Charan Grover (Jackie Shroff). To do so, he and his team participate in the world dance championship and hire a loud-mouthed pub dancer, Mohini (Deepika Padukone), as their dance teacher.

The film believes in hardcore entertainment no doubt. It is intricately designed to provide for situational comedy, fight sequences and heart winning benevolent acts. Its every frame seems adorned with captivating colors seeking visual splendor. To begin with, there is mud fight in which our hero and narrator (SRK aka Charlie), gets beaten enough to fall down mud-struck. Little did we know that this scene was incorporated to bring in water pipes (ya, that happens in fights, we just didn’t know it!) and let the cool gushing water splash and erase all the dirt to reveal Shah Rukh’ s perfectly toned body that bears the much talked about 6/8/10 pack abs! Add to it is some stolen melodrama from an old Salim-Javed screenplay declaring Charlie’s father to be a thief that angers him enough to win the fight. Khan also deliciously recites a lot of lines from his previous films perhaps because mouthing your own dialogues can be witty and funny! He also makes for the perfect male eye candy, only he has looked hotter romancing (read loving) leading ladies in those translucent shirts in his signature films.

Here by, Charlie introduces the rest of his ‘loser’ gang with every character purposely affixed with an idiosyncrasy to create more or less petty humor. Sonu Sood aka Jag with a Ceasar’s deaf ear plays a wild elephant set loose every time anyone mentions his mother's name with disgrace. His right ear fuming out smoke and shirtless-ness majorly make up his stage. What’s out rightly idiotic is a woman gawking at his well packaged abdominal muscles and signaling an amorous ‘Call me’ evidently after he has crossed her! Abhishek Bachchan aka Nandu is wasted in the film with only pieces of garish humor left to be carried off by him. His habit of occasionally puking looks as disgusting as it sounds! Boman Irani aka Tammy seems pretty relaxed standing next to our beloved superstar and letting him bear the entire film with stylish/ charismatic/ mind-blowing / *any good adjective you can think of* grace. Also titled ‘Stud’ and ‘Fatty’ at times, Boman’s gags mainly revolve around his overbearing mommy who he is childishly afraid of and of course being fat gives so much scope for additional humor in dance sequences! Vivaan Shah aka Rohan Singh plays a boring, un-cool among girls' guy. He is an exceptional hacker though so just don’t bother with how he does it because being a exceptional is a reason in itself.

Enter Deepika Padukone aka Mohini (that name so that we can hear the famous Mohini chant in a sleazy setting yet again). It is refreshing to watch her as she appears post the establishment of male characters (a lot of them!) Her stylized and sexy item number Lovely is enchanting as the song is catchy, well choreographed and visually glittery. As Mohini, a desi muffat who can’t speak English (or even Hindi) properly and is thereby charmed by Charlie’s accent, Deepika is in her acting shoes right on for the rest of the film. (We owe that to one of her previous directors, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, don’t we?) 

Charlie and Mohini’s pieces of narrative are interesting. Farah Khan makes full use of her pretty looking actors.For instance all Mohini has to do to woo the ‘otherwise uninterested in women’ Charlie, is dress up and walk in front of an audience! Their love brewing chemistry is pretty tacit with none ever directly reciting romantic lines to the other. Ofcourse there are those Shah Rukh moments but they are limited enough to disappoint romantics.

It is impressive to note that the director roped in leading ‘art house’ filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and popular music director Vishal Dadlani to play hard-to-please judges for country level dance competition. It’s the mere presence of these known personalities that invokes laughter at their comical histrionics. Charlie’s action sequence during the World Dance Championship event is stylish but uninteresting rap background music does not lend to the entertaining mood that was meant to prevail. A more Tarantino approach could have done better! The song India wale comes at the right moment when Charlie is to give a befitting reply to a mocking Charan Grover (Jackie Shroff), who has a history of backstabbing Charlie’s father, a rather trivial part played by SRK’s DDLJ ‘pops’, Anupam Kher.

Surprisingly, the film manages to bring in those patriotic goose bumps with the age old adage of India being the country of dilwale. The benevolent Charlie saves a little kid in the opposition team from injuring himself fatally to provide for ample whistle moments and Mohini, the bar dancer who values and dreams of attaining ‘izzat’, knows better than to to break hearts of people, then no matter what befall her.

Despite all that’s faulty, perhaps it is this understanding of what pleases our hearts that will render the film to flourish at the box office. And of course there is the Badshah as the Diwali bumper offer, whose charm is worth more than the ticket price any counter can ask for. Long live the King!

RATING- 2.5 stars