Though it is praiseworthy to take remake rights from the owners, they must stop calling films by that term when there is nothing at all common other than the basic idea. And that is what “The Shaukeens” is vis-à-vis the 1982 Basu Chatterjee film “Shaukeeen,” distinguished as the first film in which we saw a “lucky” spelling — note the three ‘e’s!
Three 60-plus rich men who are fast buddies — one married (Anupam Kher) to a woman (Rati Agnihotri, who played the female protagonist in the former film) who has abandoned romance and sex for religion, the other a widower (Piyush Mishra) and the third a slimy bachelor (Annu Kapoor) decide to satiate their suppressed libido together.
The final solution is to move to Mauritius, said to be a covert hotbed of such peccadilloes, and have a blast. The beachside p-lace they rent belongs to young Ahana (Lisa Haydon), an impulsive, stupid and superficial young maiden for whom wearing less and using her brain even lesser seems to be an innocuous mantra — never mind if it can mislead people such as these sexually suppressed uncles!
This airhead of sorts has another weakness — she is an insane fan of superstar Akshay Kumar(incidentally the co-producer of this film). And she has this delusion that she is an ace designer, when she makes clothes and accessories with bizarre raw materials like the skin of dead monkeys and used toothpicks!
While the three best friends turn rivals as they try to win Ahana over by getting her to meet her dreamboat Akshay in their own ways (he is shooting there), Akshay sees red every time he encounters the girl, which he does thrice, once with each of them! He is already incensed by a Bengali director whom he is not able to satisfy as an actor. What follows could have been screwball funny but settles down into tolerably light entertainment and a mildly funny watch, thanks to the breezy (yet never hilarious) screenplay (a pleasant surprise from Tigmanshu Dhulia, the writer-director of dark and intense movies who tried to be mainstream with “Bullett Raja” and flopped).
While the technical values are superb, the songs are a sore point (though a couple sound okay in the film, like “It’s A Lonely Night” and “Manali Trance”). The acting honors are shared by Lisa (who is correctly un-Indian and screwball), Akshay, Anupam and Piyush (he’s quite a scream). Annu Kapoor is just alright, but a complete surprise and delight is Rati as Anupam’s derailed wife.
But what I loved about this film (and I am no admirer of the original, though it was a hit) was the twist that Akshay Kumar gives while playing himself in the longest such role after Dharmendra’s “Guddi.” The issues about films as a business versus arty cinema, the craving for a National Award, the pseudo-intellectual and unstable Bengali and artsy director, the digs at star managers and secretaries, the eccentric and erratic star tantrums and addiction to alcohol — this aspect of the film, totally irrelevant to the main plot, takes the film to a different zone, vis-à-vis the older film. And Akshay the star is also a crucial player in the unfolding of the main storyline.
Go watch “The Shaukeens” — despite its shortcomings in humor (the director of “Tere Bin Laden” could have done much better, ditto writer Dhulia, in terms of fun quotient), it is a decent, one-time watch. And I, for one, preferred it to the professed original, which was over-hyped. For more chuckles, await the next mainstream director’s comedy — be it Rohit Shetty or Anees Bazmee.
