Jai Ho: A mockery of the medium

Salman Khan’s latest is not worth the time it took to write this review.

KARACHI:

To err is human, but to never learn from your errors is being Sohail Khan. We may have wished that the epic legacy of the last clueless son of Salim Khan would end with pointless films like Fight Club, but that never happened.

There were times when even Arbaaz Khan was equally clueless about his film career, until he married a popular model and is now considered a pioneer of the Dabangg genre. Arbaaz learnt the hard way and Sohail kept on giving us a hard time. He kept moving on with his loud but laughable portrayal of all the characters that he ever played, making our big screen experience more annoying then Johnny Lever trying, and failing, to be funny. So now you can imagine what happens when someone who is known for his ‘method yelling’ decides to call the shots for a Salman Khan starrer? Well, Salman Khan starts roaring  — literally.

That’s what Jai Ho is all about  — a loud Salman Khan. The rest of the kicks, punches and puns are an unavoidable combo that is typical of every mainstream Bollywood film these days. To be honest, even the roaring part is not original, as it was used less shamefully in Ajay Devgn’s Singham; a film that fell in a similar domain of popular cinema, but still gave the audience something to laugh, mourn and celebrate.

Jai Ho, on the other hand, can only be despised. The one thing that it does legitimately accomplish is to make one judge themselves for paying Rs500 for such a tasteless experience  — not entirely because Jai Ho barely deserves to be classified as a film, but more so because of its horrendous and naïve take on the concept of morality. It won’t even work  for the ‘masses’ that the Indian producers so often suggest like everything that features a good looking, muscular  messiah trying to save them from an apocalypse of social injustices.  It is so brainless that the only close example you could find being as insulting to the audience’s intellect is the Pakistani film Chambaili, with added muscle and minus the politics. In a nutshell, the film has no script  — just vapid dialogues which are not even as engaging as the end credits.

Khan (Jai Agnihotri) is an ex-Army officer who decided to save some hostages against the order of the supervising officer and was suspended from the service. Since then, he has become a one-man moral police, who’d fight the goons, rescue kidnapped children, perpetually save the day etc, only to ask for one thing in return: “Jis Tarhan mae nae aapki madad ki, aap bhi teen logon ki madad karna (Just as I have assisted you, you should help three more).” He even does the math in one scene and explains to everyone listening how this is going to change India altogether.  Despite his ‘helping three people’ rhetoric, no one does as he says and he eventually decides to tackle everything by the power of his fist. That is not to say that he wasn’t using his fist before this realisation; it just gave him a license to keep on doing what he was doing, and the audience a green signal to leave at the intermission.

Khan barely acts, as his scenes mostly seem improvised (in a bad way) and ironically his sister, played by Tabu, gets more attention in her Shalwar Kameez than Rinky the female lead and love interest, played by Daisy Shah, who couldn’t stay relevant to the film at all. If you can call Jai Ho a film to begin with.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18d4tz_jai-ho-teaser-trailer-feat-salman-khan-tabu_music

Verdict: Don’t watch it or else you’ll judge yourself more than other people will.

Rating:  0.5/5

 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2014.

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