2014: Bollywood’s worst year

It’s true, you know, what they say: Bollywood is changing. It is. It’s getting bolder, bigger. But only in one respect. Looking at the worst Bollywood films of the last few years, two things are clear: Bollywood is getting more and more audacious. Its eagerness to explore and dwell in new depths of bad taste, idiocy and banality is singular; and two, it is now spending more and more money on these dreadful outings.

Such is the state of affairs that you’ve probably seen all 10 of the worst films we’ve listed here, but would have missed at least two of the five films we consider the best of Bollywood 2014. You’ve probably seen Haider, Queen and Dedh Ishqiya, but would have missed director Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely. It’s a brilliant, brooding film set in the C-grade film (read soft porn) industry of the Eighties that uses the combination of horror and sex to tell a story about love on the sets of, well, horror and sex.

You probably also missed Ankhon Dekhi, Rajat Kapoor’s best film to date. It’s a pulsating mood piece on life, living and, when it comes full circle, letting go. The budget of these five films put together would probably be what Akshay Kumar, our A-grade film star who is a regular on the worst films list every year, charges for one torturous appearance.

That’s why this time we haven’t concerned ourselves with disasters like Chaarfutiya Chhokare, Yaariyan, Fugly, Ungli, Raja Natwarlal, Desi Katte, even Super Nani and Revolver Rani films that were small and pitiful.  

The 10 films we list here are not just epic disasters, but are films where huge sums of money was spent on getting top actors with their vanity vans, handlers, hairdressers, choreographers, designers, make-up artists. These are films which were shot on various locations, had elaborate sets managed by teams on walkie-talkies, demanded catering for hundreds, and were backed by multi-pronged marketing assaults, all in the pursuit of making box-office history.

Some of these films did well at the box-office, especially Happy New Year. But we are not accounting for anybody’s bad taste. We are just focused on pricey duds, on energy-sucking yawns encased in bright and lavish frames.
 

1. Humshakals

Sajid Khan’s Humshakals is our topper for a reason. It’ll take very special talent and unimaginable levels of stupidity to beat his 2014 calamity. We have suffered Sajid I-only-spoof-Bollywood Khan’s idiocy before. But Humshakals outdoes all his previous sins.

Humshakals is free of a single coherent thought, commonsense and, worse, it’s not funny. It is, in fact, designed to make us suffer. Few minutes into this 159-minute-long torture and I started having suicidal thoughts.

Humshakals doesn’t have characters. It has cretins of varying grades of lunacy and a script that’s primitive. There are susu showers, cocaine and vodka paranthas, a Hindi-speaking Prince Charles, a ticking bomb, two crotch-biting midgets, a killer wheelchair, and three burly men dressed as busty women who prance around in their falsies spraying the horny spray. It also has girls — three dimwits who had to share one brain cell amongst themselves which, as is quite obvious, one of them ate during interval.

If I could, I would have pulled out the pillow Saif Ali Khan had shoved into his bra and beaten myself to death with it.

2. Entertainment

Junior, a cute but confused Thai golden retriever, and a screaming Akshay Kumar do not make a film. They make dimag ka dahi.Entertainment marked a whole new low even for Bollywood. But it was appropriate that this enterprise was led by Akshay Kumar who has been determinedly plumbing new depths of stupidity with every film that he signs up.

It took two fully grown men to write and “direct” Entertainment which doesn’t have a story. It has a stupid situation that tumbles into stupefying stupidity via a string of contrived incidents.

A loud, moronic fest, the film first pits a Bollywood superstar against a Thai golden retriever, and then pits its Indian and Thai stars against two brothers gone totally camp and daffy. It’s a crime to call this deathly boring film Entertainment. The only takeaway was that Akshay Kumar’s acting and speaking talents are no competition to the golden retriever.

3. Gunday

We should send Bangladeshis “thank you” cards. They are so sweet. They gave Gunday exactly what it deserved: the choicest abuses.Director Ali Abbas Zafar’s Gunday was a puerile film that pandered to its stars so shamelessly that it completely ignored its characters, story and even what was happening on the screen.

The film sets up Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor in a way that they have crackling, hormonal chemistry that screams gay. Their bronzed, oiled torsos ripple together, they take off each others’ shirts and even sleep and pee together. If the film had, well, testicles, it should have gone all homoerotic on us. Instead it brings in Priyanka Chopra in ethnic ensembles and spoils the film that Gunday could have been.

Gunday, in fact, repeatedly misses its calling. Initially it aspires to be a film about cool, comic delinquents, but forgets all about that and just trains the cameras on its stars as they swagger and strut their stuff. Goody, goody torsos makes the film go belly up.

4. Dawat-e-Ishq

If writer-director Habib Faisal had focused all his cameras just on plates of food from Lucknow and Hyderabad kebabs, biryani, shahi tukda, jalebis his dull-as-dishwater film would have been mildly memorable.    

But he didn’t, and what we got instead was a cureless dud that begins with a social cause there’s some nonsense about dowry and dowry-seeking leeches but soon sinks into a needlessly complicated, elaborate con that takes us to a restaurant where even though we are smitten somewhat by Aditya Roy Kapoor’s twinkling, kohled eyes and impish charm, the conning doofuses Parineeti Chopra and her daddy Anupam Kher keep irritating us. The proceedings are so vapid that it made me want to scream, “Waiter, manager ko bulao! Parineeti ko samjhao.”

5. Grand Masti

There are adult comedies and there is mental retardation. In this thing called Grand Masti, three grown men have twisted the English alphabet and it goes like this: A for ass, B for breasts, C for, well, and F for, you know. They are in pursuit of F. Always. Forever. That’s the film's script. All of it.

It has boys called Hardik who drop their kachchas, erections that set off alarms, phallic things that are covered in condoms, and phallic items cut into two. There are suggestions of oral sex, kela jokes, jokes about coming, more jokes about breasts, a cat called pussy, a Nanga gang that rapes women, a university called SLUTS, and the pursuit of F.

There are shots of heaving, buxom women in various stages of undress, followed by the panting of desperate, sleazy men in various stages of undress, followed by shots of heaving, buxom women... all without a pause in between. A, as they say, is for ass.

6. Ek Villain

Balaji Productions wanted us to believe that Ek Villain was a thriller. Ek Villain was anything but. It was ek long, punishing headache that at one point became a horror show: it gave us KRK in teeny-weeny wet chaddies. Eeow!

The only thrill one could extract from it were a few weak chuckles courtesy its preposterous story about an emotionally needy serial killer, an even more needy victim, and their two spouses one crabby, and the other perpetually sulking.

Riteish Deshmukh as the serial killer had a backpack, a raincoat, a screw driver, but zero rationale for serially killing people. We are made to wade through such nonsense that you and I could not come up with more idiotic moments even if we sat together for a week and tried really, really hard. The fresh as dew Shraddha Kapoor and the handsome but expressionless Sidharth Malhotra could have saved the film if Riteish Deshmukh had not tried his hand at that thing called acting. Scarier than the wet chaddies!

7. Jai Ho!

We’ve all grown up on Bollywood and we can take a lot. A lot. But we too have our limits. I draw the line at watching Salman Khan sitting in lotus pose, right-hand raised and giving soporific pravachan about helping others, about doing samaj seva, and only taking brief breaks to leap out and beat the crap out of the bad guys before returning to his shant lotus pose.

Salman Khan sermonises about everything in Jai Ho! from expensive food at cinema halls to corrupt cops, from traffic jams caused by VIPs to helping the needy. Worse, at the end he leaves us with a formula for turning around India: The power of 3. All in the interest of public morality. Really? Are we living in an alternative world where we need gyan from a finger-wagging Salman Khan?

This dhishum-dhishum Buddha, who is forever pained by the world’s suffering, would have been mildly bearable if Sri Sri Salman Khan had looked less constipated when he was really trying to go for sad. It’s one thing to enjoy his Chulbul act, it’s a leap of faith to take a sermonising Salman Khan seriously. I can’t do it.


8. Holiday

A.R. Murugadoss’ Holiday, a film about a soldier on holiday, drags us back to the days of idiot khufia agents in pursuit of desh ke dushman.The soldier who is on holiday but is obviously not on holiday, has to save his desh from “sleeper cells” of a terrorist network who carry bombs, kidnap girls, and threaten a repeat of 26/11.

This tacky backdrop is just so that Akshay Kumar can fight Die Hard style, complete with gory chopping, shooting and lots of breaking.Sonakshi Sinha, the box-office talisman, hangs around the film like a lucky charm, reinforcing her reputation as the most consistent female lead of worst films.Holiday is sometimes so bad that it could have been good. But, sadly, it’s also very, very moronic.

9. Happy New Year

Before this thing released, I could have tortured you for days with a single thought, one sentence: Imagine Ocean’s 11 directed by Farah Khan, where  Sh...Sh...Sh...Shah Rukh Khan replaces George Clooney and Deepika Padukone plays Julia Roberts. I can’t anymore, because that nightmare actually played in our cinema halls.

HNY is supposed to be a heist film, but it’s powered only by the past and power of Shah Rukh Khan. The film undresses SRK, one rippling muscle after another, in sexy slo-mo. We see him wet, muddy, grungy, and every time the camera caresses him top to bottom, again and again. And when he opens his mouth, he spews one old dialogue after another from his ancient hits, playing a character who is in continuum from Rahul to Raj.

This could have worked if the heist was interesting. HNY could have worked if SRK and Deepika Padukone had some chemistry. The only chemistry on display was Abhishek Bachchan’s bond with his long kachchas.

10. Mary Kom

How do you turn an energising real-life story into a dispiriting film? Ask director Omung Kumar. Or watch Mary Kom.Mary Kom is a filmy faluda that sacrifices authentic storytelling for phoney feelings. Kumar takes a truly compelling story of a real-life sportswoman and, employing a chain of cliches, turns it into a film about a daughter and a mother.

Because, as per Bollywood and its directors, the real achievement of a world champion five times over is how well she balances her motherly duties with her world championship outings. This chauvinistic, patriarchal retelling of a story that breaks more stereotypes than we can count is vomit inducing.

Boxing is never the focus of this film. What’s important is how good a mommy, daughter and wife Mary is. Mary Kom deserves a better film.