Dog Day Afternoon
Film: Entertainment
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Tamannaah, Johnny Lever, Junior the
wonder dog
Directed by: Sajid-Farhad
Duration: 2 hrs 20 mins
Rating: * *
From time to time, Bollywood explores new depths of lunacy
and since many of those films end up making tons of money, they tend to go
where no human brain has gone before, as far as conceiving silly ideas is
concerned. Entertainment is about a dog of the same name who becomes the heir
to a Rs.3000 crore empire (never mind if they calculate using the rupee even
though the story is set in Bangkok) after a rich business man passes away
leaving everything to the canine.
Now, anyone who knows anything about the film (it has Akshay
Kumar in the lead role that gives a fair idea) will know what to expect from
it. I was prepared for the worst on just about every count but surprisingly, it
was not as painful as some other films we have endured. It is silly, garrulous,
slapstick, over the top but it is inherently all of those and not because of
lazy writing. However ludicrous (and sometimes funny) the dialogue may sound, there
is at least some effort gone into writing it and the debutante director duo of
Sajid-Farhad have been around for a while writing dialogues, nothing
particularly memorable till now though.
The aam aadmi (in the literal sense) Akhil (Akshay Kumar) wants
to marry his sweetheart (Tamannaah) but her dad (Mithun Chakraborty) objects
because he is not rich enough. Suddenly he discovers that his long lost father
is a billionaire in Thailand. Off he goes with his pal (Krushna) to claim the
inheritance only to discover that one, the old man is dead and two, he has
bequeathed his whole empire to his dog.
There are a couple of other thorns in the flesh as well,
Akhil’s cousins (Sonu Sood and Prakash Raj) who don’t want a slice of the pie,
they want the whole pie itself. There are more than a handful Bollywood references and the
favourite punching bag, Balaji and Ekta Kapoor
(One line goes like this - Humari Ekta Shobha nahin deti or something to that effect)
While till the
intermission point there are a few laughs, they dry up when the crotch grabbing
starts and drags on till the end. If you enjoy labored lines likes “Use aisa pati chahiye jise sympathy nahin
balki jis ke pas sampatti ho” then there are plenty of them here.
Most of the actors, from Akshay Kumar to Johnny Lever go
through the same drill that they’ve been going through for years. Tamannaah’s
Hindi filmography doesn’t have anything remarkable but to be fair she manages
to hold fort.
If you can get entertained by anything that comes your way,
then you are likely to get entertained by Entertainment.
Published in The Navhind Times on 10th Aug 2014
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