SRK, ALL TME WAY

Happy New Year

STARRIN G: hah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Abhishek Bachchan, Boman Irani, Vivaan Shah, Jackie Shroff DIR ECTO R: Farah Khan

What is it about Shah Rukh Khan that brings out the comic accent in Deepika Padukone? She did a very funny, broad, South Indian accent in Mr Khan's inspired company in the maddeningly mundane Chennai Express She repeats the farcical feat, th is time doing a bravura Maharashtrian accent, a bar dancer grooving to Kaanta laga in her own free time.

Deepika dreams of running her own dance school where little girls will l earn to dance not for drooling men, but just for the love of it.

And she's nailed it! That's what this film is all about! It's been made with no loftier intention than to provide low-brow entertainment

Happy New Year (HNY) is the cinematic equivalent of freshly-plucked guavas from a roadside tree Juicy, tempting but of indeterminate origin Eat and enjoy at your own risk

Some of the stuff passing off as humour in this tall of tale of a bunch of losers who dance their way into a billionrupee heist, is pretty ummm ugh Abhishek Bachchan, who plays another interesting character.just vomits on unsuspecting victims to get his way HNY is the kind of film that doesn't allow us to dwell on the crimes of excesses, of which there is plenty in this stretchedout plot. The carnival - like presentation is not quite the aesthetic experience that one expects from a film with such a classy l ine-up of actors and technicians.

Instead what we get in abundance are in-house jokes where Shah Rukh Khan does dialogue take-offs with his co-stars from his own famous films

Speaking of take-offs, there is an excess of shirtless scenes featuring the King Khan and Sonu Sood who seem to enjoy dropping thei r shirts for no other reason but to become i nstant eye-candy for the ladies in the audience For most of the playing time the main actors play graceless dancers masquerading as wannabe winners at an international dance contest whose owner Jackie Shroff (scowling constantly) has a strange version to all things Indian

Of course that gives our five heroes (and I am including Deepika in the list) a chance to dance with the Indian flag being waved defiantly at all the unpatriotic spoilsports

The formula is fearsomely in-yourface You can't miss the broadness of the humour and the patriotic spirit Every emotion is like a message written on a t -shirt Every actor seems to have been given the brief to be as loud as possible. No wonder Sonu Sood plays a partially deaf character It offsets the plot's ditsy celebration of dumbness.

Deepika i s one ofthe more interesting characters in Fa rah's new 3-hour danceheist marathon She sparkles in the dance and the talkie portions. Abhishek Bachchan's tapori act is written with overthe-top intentions. He manages to play the character w ith a certain in-built coo l that perhaps was not there in plot. But then, who knows what was and wasn't there? Even Farah would be flummoxed if asked.

Sonu Sood , Boman Irani and young Vivaan Shah suffer because of sketch il y written parts but still succeed in making their presence felt, specia ll y Sood who as per character sketch plays a 'bad' dancer which he is not by any stretch of imagination

But it's the King Khan's show all the way The director misses no chance to make Shah Rukh's 'loser ' character Charlie emerge as a winne r Shah Rukh even has a long rooftop fight sequence with Korean dancers which has no bearing on anything but the hero's 8-pack midriff. Somewhere in the scramb le to engage our attention, the plot comes up with fi l mmaker Anurag Kas hyap and musician Vishal Dadlani p l aying closet-gay reality- show judges who are blackmailed by Charlie i nto el igib il ity Heroes, in case we forget, can do no wrong; even when they are caught doing wrong. For all its sins of excesses HNY is a full-on paisa-vasoo/ movie. It i s a rollicking, rumbustious ode to the spi r it of whopping, howling, shrieking and bantering camaraderie Filled with tongue-in- cheek episodes of h i pswaying audacity, the all-pervasive madness i s infectious.

SUBHASH K JHA