‘Ra.One’
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Armaan Verma
When ‘Ra.One’ opens, the audience is already nursing headaches — the person tasked with converting it into 3D makes white letters pop out of a black screen right from the logo to the disclaimer.
Then, we take an aerial tour of London, and pop into Barron Industries. Jenny (Shahana Goswami) seems to be teaching a ‘Technology for Dummies’ class. The dummies are suitably awed by a hologram image of the founder, Barron (Dalip Tahil). Barron appears only twice in flesh – he addresses his office staff in Pidgin Hindustani, and argues with Ra.One (Arjun Rampal) in chaste Hindi.
Next, we see Shah Rukh Khan speeding through strange lands, to perform a stunt straight out of Wolverine’s forest sequence in ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’. Then, he jets off to rescue an annoyingly high-pitched Priyanka Chopra, dressed in a skimpy red number, from ‘Khalnayak’ (Sanjay Dutt) whose decaying teeth we get uncomfortably close to. Turns out this superhero, Lucifer, is a kid’s wishful projection of his cowardly father Shekar Subramaniam (Shah Rukh Khan) in another avatar.
His American-accented British school teacher breaks into his reverie. We find out his Appa, whose vocabulary is limited to “aiyyo!”, “vandu kondu”, “rascalla”, “illaa” and “ingay vaa”, is a klutz who owns a fleet of Volkswagen cars, crashes into the one Alto in England, eats noodles-and-curd with his hands, and sports an Afro. Oh! he makes a living by designing cool video games and poorly-animated PPTs.
He’s married to Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), whose contribution to feminism involves writing a thesis on swearwords. She believes world domination lies in changing the ma-behn genus to baap-bhai-chacha. Her other linguistic accomplishment is regularly mispronouncing “konjam konjam”, “condom, condom”.
Despite this, and the multiple injuries Shekar sustains on his procreative organs, he entertains hopes of making more babies, and conveys as much to Sonia on her typewriter.
Shekar decides to win his son over by designing a video game where the villain Ra.One is more powerful than the hero G.One (Shah Rukh Khan in bot form). Full points for wordplay. The family attends the launch, and Sonia lovingly asks her husband to “re-lakes” as he is racked by nervous tics. When she turns to her son and gleefully says, “Papa is looking so hot, na?” Then, Shekar and Sonia decide to boogie away, leaving their son to experiment with the game, under the supervision of the Japanese-named Chinese gaming whiz Akashi (Tom Wu).
Sonia’s penchant to strip is the reason everyone – including G.One, who has been coaxed out of the virtual world – fails to notice Ra.One’s reappearance in various forms on two later occasions.
Sonia has decision-making trouble. She takes her son to the site of a gory accident, but shields him from risqué magazine ads. She buries a relative in a coffin, but contrives to scatter his ashes in the Thames. She alternates between consulting the rearview mirror and swinging her head around while driving. She switches from a grieving widow to gamebot-molester in three minutes, and relocates multiple times.
The movie is a revelation to Tam Brahms, who will discover that their customs include using their grandfathers’ – and not fathers’ – first names as surnames, celebrating karva chauth, worshipping Madhubani paintings, and living in exclusive gated communities reserved for their species in Mumbai, where their daughters dance the alarippu every day.
But the rest of the world may have its share of epiphanies too. For instance, NRI kids in London have Mumbaiyya accents, and are fond of Americanisms such as “zip it, crap face” and “I’m gonna whoop his ass.” We also ascertain that Chitti, who was last seen in a display case in ‘Endhiran’ (Robot in Hindi) still wears lipstick and speaks of his memory in terms of “jigabyte”. We learn the contours of the abdomen guards sported by Ra.One and G.One.
The movie has one funny moment, one decent twist, and two re-recording themes – aiyo-aiyo and paithyakara- paithyakara. Aside from the catchy ‘Chammak chalo’, the only positive is a sizzling Arjun Rampal.