There are some movies which are good and some which are bad and some which fall somewhere in between. But I’m going to be now analyzing a movie which falls under a completely new category- movies which are plain boring. I’ll come to that in due course of time. But as of now lets talk about YRF one of the most well known production & distribution houses in the country. A few years ago Yash Chopra & Aditya Chopra decided to follow the Hollywood style of “studio” functioning in the full sense by making multiple movies every year with a lot of directors signed up for multi film contracts. They realized that it was the best way to go in terms of scaling up since the father & son team couldn’t direct too many films by themselves.
So then we saw a slew of films across genres from romance ( Fanaa, Hum Tum, Saathiya, Bachna Ae Haseeno etc ), action ( Dhoom series ), sports ( Chak De India ), social ( Aaja Nachle, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag ), animation ( Roadside Romeo ), terrorism (New York ), slice of life ( Rocket Singh : Salesman of the Year ) etc. All these films have been directed by outside directors like Kunal Kohli, Siddharth Anand,Shimit Amin, Kabeer Khan, Sanjay Gadhvi etc. While some of the films worked, some didn’t and the films kept coming to us in regular intervals.
Whenever a YRF film flopped the detractors would say that the glory days of YRF are coming to an end and when a film became a hit the detractors would again say it was probably a fluke or something else. Of course loyalists continued to remain stead fast in their faith towards the films coming out from YRF. I for one have been following all their films for the past so many years and watch them all- sometimes feeling satisfied & sometimes not so satisfied. So all this was at the back of my mind when I went on to watch their recent film Badmaash Company, the directorial debut of actor Parmeet Sethi and having a young team of actors.
Shahid Kapur who has been going through a lean patch after Kaminey (Dil Bole Hadippa, Chance Pe Dance & Paathshaala being flops) and Anushka Sharma (finally seen again after RNBDJ) play the leads here. The story is all about how Karan (Shahid) &Bulbul ( Anushka ) along with their friends –Chandu ( Vir Das ) and Zing ( Meiyang Chang) go through a roller coaster ride of doing wrong things the right way i.e their way.
Set in the 1990’s when consumerism in India was still at its infant stage and with import-export policies being a lot different then, these 4 friends decide to start an importing business and make use of loopholes in the system as they develop their own ways of beating the system.
A rare paisa vasool moment
This in a nutshell friends is what the film is all about and yes like most other Hindi films these days, the action shifts from India to overseas ( the U.S here ) in the 2nd half giving way for more of the same stuff. Frankly speaking the 1st half gets to a close within an hour’s span and it leaves you wondering what you had been seeing till then. Ridiculous mechanisms of con jobs are shown again & again with Shahid trying to make us understand the process flow completely.
So at the half way stage as the action shifts to the U.S you are hoping that there would be something more interesting happening and that one would finally witness some genuine moments. Alas! Nothing such happens and you get to see the same silly con jobs handled the same way and depicted in the same way- its like Parmeet felt-“let’s maintain the consistency friends” . The sequences especially in the 2nd half leave you completely cold and you are left wondering what’s happening. Check out the “Bleeding Madras” sequence especially the portion with Michael Jackson ( yes I’m serious ) and you’ll know where I’m coming from.
Talking about the acting and the characters – Shahid Kapur looks so disinterested that you are left wondering what happened to the Shahid of films like Jab We Met & Kaminey.The only thing for Anushka is that she gets to sport some yuppy outfits when compared to her previous film- otherwise she has relatively nothing else to do. Vir Das & Meiyang Chang are decent, but no great shakes. But it’s a matter of great pity that veteran artistes like Pawan Malhotra, Anupam Kher and Kiran Juneja also have nothing much to do. In the beginning when you see Anupam Kher and Kiran Juneja playing Shahid Kapur’s parents, you get a vision of Khosla Ka Ghosla in your mind, but all that thought goes crashing very soon.
Music by Pritam is very ordinary and you’d hardly remember any songs after you complete the film. This is very surprising since most YRF films are known to have a good soundtrack. If the 1st half of the movie left you feeling what happened in the 1 hr of duration, the 2nd half comes across as very slow, lengthy and irritating overall. So let me go back to the different category of films that I started mentioning initially- movies which are plain boring. Badmaash Company is a prime example of such movies. I’d not really like to slot it in any other way.
At the time of writing this I realize that the movie is doing decently at the box office and may end up being commercially good for YRF. That makes me all the more worried- will a “barbaad company” like this inspire more such “barbaad” films from YRF? I hope not so that I’ll again go and watch their next film like I usually do.
Originally published in PFC- http://passionforcinema.com/badmaash-company-movie-review-beware-of-this-%E2%80%9Cbarbaad-company%E2%80%9D/
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