When one watches a film like Badmashiyaan  one can’t help but wonder: where do such films come from? A banter over drinks? Or, simply, a desire to feel the glamour and glitz of the film industry and an overwhelming desire to belong? For as soon as the film starts to unwind, you know it is a disaster unreeling on the screen.

There is this girl, Suzanna Mukherjee, who pretends to fall in love with vulnerable men for the sole purpose of conning them. Fall in love, promise marriage, and vanish via the loo after looting them. Her first victim is Sidhant Gupta, a café owner in Chandigarh. Totally besotted with her, he begs, borrows, steals and buys a two crore house to settle his future wife, Suzanna. On a date at a café, she takes time off to go to loo and never returns. 

Gupta is heartbroken while Suzanna has found a new target, Sharib Hashmi, a Haryanvi don notwithstanding the fact that we have had too much of these UP, Bihar and Haryanvi dons, comic as well as caricatures. 

Suzanna makes away with some five lakh of the don’s cash, her accomplice is picked up and stripped naked by the don’s man. In case you happen to watch the film and miss it, this is supposed to be the comic element in the film! On his part, the don does not want his money back (despite wasting an hour of running time beating up this poor sod and stripping him to find where the money is), he has fallen head over heels in love with Suzanna and he wants her instead. 

If watching this film is an ordeal, writing about it is even bigger torture. 

Nobody performs in this film and that includes the writer, director and actors. 

In a year that has seen some of the worst films being released, Badmashiyaan takes the crown for the first quarter of 2015.

'Dirty Politics': What’s the other kind?

Eons back, celebrated and one of the most gifted filmmakers, Kundan Shah, was working on a script about a Maharashtrian Tamasha girl going on to become the Chief Minister of the state. I suppose the film was too regional in flavour besides the fact that political themes don’t go down well with our audience and, hence, never made.

Here, a similar theme seems to have been used for titillation rather than to weave a story around the idea that in politics, anything is possible. 

Mallika Sherawat, a dancer, has a powerful politician fan in Om Puri. Their proximity sows the seeds of political ambitions in her. But, alas, come elections and she is not on the list of nominees. So she decides to use her ticket to attain her goal: CDs of close encounters between her and Puri, which would defame Puri and ruin his political career. 

How corny can a plot get when people nowadays don’t care who sleeps with whom as long as they deliver? (Reminds me of a prominent politician spokesperson cum lawyer whose explicit videos were on public domain and he still continues to be all that he used to be!) What follows is predictable. Sherawat goes missing and all sorts of corny plots and subplots follow. 

The film stars some of the great actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Anupam Kher besides Jackie Shroff and Ashutosh Rana but the script, the direction and Sherawat make sure they are rendered ineffective totally; they are neutralised by everything in this film of which they had no reason to be a part.