Joker: A terrible, terrible joke!

Q. What’s worse than sitting through the 100 minutes of Joker? Ans: Writing about it without being able to use some first-rate swearwords.

Lucky for you the plot, or the lack therof, is not something I have the slightest desire to revisit. Suffice it to say is that there’s an obscure village in India that is completely inhabited by mental patients.  The village has absolutely no female inhabitants (save for the ubiquitous item girl) and yet still has a thriving population.

Then there’s Akshay Kumar, who plays a US-based space scientist who eventually turns out to be the biggest mental patient of them all, his silly girlfriend, Sonakshi Sinha, who has no personality to speak of, and a lot of nonsensical alien shenanigans.

Spielberg should learn a lesson or two from the Bollywood geniuses who made this film, because apparently aliens made out of watermelons and bitter-gourds can fool even the best at Nasa! The last nail in the coffin of the plot, however, is the low brow attempt at political satire which completely misses the mark.

In Joker, director Shirish Kunder makes fun of politicians, villagers, aliens, space scientists, science itself, people with mental disabilities, people with physical disabilities and even ends up making a fool of himself. The only thing that he manages to do successfully is to unveil the extent of his own creative disability. He did however save quite a few people from serious embarrassment by taking on the roles of scriptwriter, dialogue writer, editor, lyricist and director and therefore, deserves all the credit for this colossal catastrophe.

Now to the acting, Akshay Kumar needs to stop, just stop; he is ruining whatever is left of his credibility as an actor. Sonakshi Sinha’s entire role revolves around looking pretty (which doesn’t work out either). Shreyas Talpade as Babban is cringe-worthy, and the love angle between Shreyas and Minisha Lamba is puke inducing at best.

Joker boasts of a flawed concept, distasteful dialogues, jaded jokes, awful acting, jarred editing, recycled lyrics, and very ordinary songs. The only two positives are Sudeep Chatterjee’s cinematography, which is outstanding as always, and Sukant Panigrahy’s art direction which resulted in the beautiful village sets.

I implore you to not make the same mistake as I did and stay away from Joker unless you are a masochist in the true sense of the word.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, September 23^rd, 2012.

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