annavetticadgoes2themovies: Jai Ho

Release date:	January 24, 2014
Director:	Sohail Khan
Cast: Language:	Salman Khan, Tabu, Naman Jain, Daisy Shah, Danny Denzongpa, Sana Khan, Nadira Babbar, Genelia Deshmukh, Mukul Dev, Mahesh Thakur, Ashmit Patel, Suniel Shetty, Pulkit Samrat Hindi

I’ve just come away from watching the most unexciting Salman Khan film since Veer in 2010. Jai Ho has none of the slick action of Wanted that helped Salman cross over from his traditional fan base to a larger audience. It has none of the action comedy of Dabangg that planted him firmly in the midst of this new-found following. In fact, it has little that’s new to offer within the Salman Khan genre of films (and yes, that is a separate genre).

Jai Ho is an official remake of the 2006 Telugu film Stalin which was inspired by the US film Pay It Forward. In the original, a child (played by Haley Joel Osment) starts a goodwill network kicked off by doing a favour to someone and asking the recipient of the favour to “pay it forward” to three others who are in turn asked to pay it forward to three more, until it becomes a national campaign. Since Indian film industries are adult-star-obsessed, the child of the Hollywood film becomes an adult played by a major male superstar in both Tollywood and Bollywood: Chiranjeevi in Telugu and Salman Khan in Hindi.

In Jai Ho, Salman plays ex-fauji Jai Dikshit, a one-man army who smashes to bits any man he catches doing wrong in his presence. His penchant for fisticuffs unwittingly earns him the enmity of the state Home Minister Dashrath Singh. Somewhere in between, when he rescues a kidnapped baby, he asks the child’s parents not to thank him but instead to do a favour to three people and further ask each of those three to help three others. That chain of favours gets lost somewhere along the way as director Sohail Khan gets diverted to what seems like the primary task of most of Salman’s directors these days: to show us how cute Salman is, how intimidating his fists are, how well-muscled his body is, how the sun rises from his eyes, how the earth revolves around that sun and how he is the centre of the film’s universe.

Sohail seems so complacent that he has neglected every other department in Jai Ho. The songs are lousy. The dances are lacklustre. Equally lacklustre is Daisy Shah, the light-eyed, light-skinned, slim-waisted actress chosen to play Jai’s girlfriend, possibly based on the MCP assumption that it doesn’t matter who the hell is the heroine so long as “Bhai” is in the film.

So unimaginative is Jai Ho that despite being a die-hard advocate of heroes going bare-chested in films, I found myself torn between yawning and being offended when Salman, as expected, finally does reveal that impeccable torso here. The man is in the middle of a truly gruesome fight. He’s been punched, shot and stabbed. He’s bleeding and in pain. Getting him to take off his top right at that point to pleasure his viewers felt truly distasteful. Was his battered, broken body meant to be titillating? In the past I have pointed out that the objectification of a willing woman is not objectionable if the goal is to provide visual pleasure without demeaning, degrading or dehumanising her. The same argument holds for our chest-flashing heroes. There have been other films in which Salman’s shirt has come off mid-fight, but they were handled better. In Dabangg, for instance, there was humour in that moment in which the wind ripped off Salman’s shirt. Today’s scene, especially considering that Jai Ho takes itself far more seriously than Dabangg, was disquieting.

Such mindlessness should not come as a surprise though in a film in which a female adult makes an inappropriate comment about a little boy’s shrivelled penis, and that child in turn nicknames her Pinky, after her pink panties, much to his Uncle’s amusement. The boy in question is Jai’s nephew (played by Naman Jain from Chillar Party) whose character is one of the loudest, crudest, most irritatingly precocious children I’ve seen in a Hindi film.

The irony is that Jai Ho’s most bearable performance comes from Tabu playing Jai’s sister Geeta. The two together give us the film’s nicest scenes. If she had been the lover, Jai Ho may have been worthwhile. But hey, it’s unthinkable in Bollywood that a 40-plus actress would play the girlfriend of a major male star even though that male star looks every bit the 48 years that he is, appears a bit tired (I noticed with a twinge of sadness) the way he did in 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger, seems no longer as light on his feet as he once was; and all this got emphasised by the fact – loudly expressed by a lady in the hall where I watched this film – that “woh heroine uski beti lagti hai”. The old order changeth, even though Bollywood and Bhai’s fans resisteth.

The film is as tired. The only novelty is that Salman here not only beats up people, he also roars in Sunny Deol style and – get this – he bites. Sunny roared in so many films that it got tiresome. Then in Yamla Pagla Deewana in 2011, he revved up the cliché by inviting us to laugh at it. Still, in his heyday he could pull off a tiger’s roar. Salman looks weird doing it, especially since he spends so much of the rest of the film talking gently about social change. Tigers are an endangered species for no fault of theirs. It’s boring films like THIS that deserve to go extinct.

Having said that, Jai Ho unexpectedly served an educational purpose for me. I’ve learnt today that “gando” is Gujarati for “crazy”. The resemblance in sound to a certain Hindi word becomes the reason for much mirth in one scene in which Pinky yells at Jai in her mother tongue. Let this not mislead you though. Jai Ho is only mildly crude in comparison with most Akshay Kumar films of recent years. What’s the Gujarati word for “dull”? Wish Pinky had told us that too.

Rating (out of five): *1/2