In Defense of Tees Maar Khan
Let me start with a disclaimer since I’ve been getting hassled by people with too much time on their hands who seem to think that just because I loved Tees Maar Khan that I must somehow be associated with Shirish Kunder, Farah Khan, and/or Akshay Kumar in some way. I am not. I do not get paid to write nor do I get any other sort of compensation. I do this on my own time because I love films and I find that my point of view isn’t really represented in a lot of the film writing out there.
You can read my review of the film here.
ETA: Please read the commenting disclaimer. Disagreeing with me is fine but nasty comments will be deleted.
The intention is to make you laugh of course, which it manages at exactly 2-and-a-half places. Don’t ask which, because those moments don’t really stay with you.
It’s the kind of movie whose makers couldn’t care less if you hated the film, fell asleep during the film, left the film in twenty minutes, or collapsed from a stroke midway through the film. They only care about the fact that you paid your two hundred bucks and bought your ticket. To hell with you after that.
- Rajeev Masand for CNN-IBN
[E]ntertains in bits and pieces but the comical situations just arent enough to keep you in splits throughout. It also tends to get a bit boring. Also the major problem with Welcome is the writing, neither the story (which of course doesn’t exist) nor the situations connect. The chemistry between the lead pair (Akshay – Katrina) is completely lacking.
- Indicine
So, it looks like the critics really hated Tees Maar Khan, right?
Well, yes but these are taken from the reviews of Housefull, Singh is Kinng, and Welcome respectively. Three box office hits and three films mostly trashed by the critics. Here is something I think critics don't understand: just because something aims to please a wide audience or bases a joke on a pratfall doesn’t make it inherently worthless. A single well-timed pratfall is worth more to me than an entire film pretentiously musing on the emptiness of the middle-class lifestyle.
Physical comedy and farce aren’t inherently stupid and are not easy to do well. Something we can accept when it’s tempered with age like Kishore Kumar in Half Ticket. Imagine somebody trying to make this today—Tun Tun (whose main joke was being fat), cross-dressing, Kishore doing full-on comedy shouting, and a plot that involves Pran trying to grab Kishore’s butt for 90% of the film.
Oh, brother, would it get panned if this had Sajid Khan’s name attached to it but we all look at it fondly now. Did they make this film with the intention of making money off of the viewing audience? Absolutely. Does that make it worthless? I don’t think so. Critics who seem to have traded their funny bone for a first-year film student’s reading list (and who cling to this ridiculous idea that film isn't also a business) do a real disservice to their reading audiences and to the industry by failing to differentiate between a smart farce like Singh is Kinng and something that’s just plain bad like No Problem. The great Roger Ebert has a theory of film reviewing that says something like: look at what the film is aiming to do and the audience it’s aiming at, and review a film on those terms. In other words, review a film on its own merits and don’t judge a film based on your preconceptions of what you thought it was going to be. It’s good advice and advice that cycled in my mind as I read review after review of Tees Maar Khan that were all essentially 500 word declarations of butthurt about how it wasn’t Om Shanti Om 2. (Pssst… confidential to Rachel Saltz: It wasn’t trying to be.) There are two differences between Tees Maar Khan and Farah Khan’s other films—one is Akshay Kumar and two is Shirish Kunder’s script. For whatever reason Akshay Kumar cannot catch a break from critics and the press, who seem to resent that he is making films at all. Akshay is mocked not just in reviews but all the time—what other hero gets called a jackass in the mainstream media? Having Akshay Kumar in your film automatically puts it in the negative column for critics, just like having Shahrukh will give you a boost. I’m not hating on SRK or saying he doesn’t deserve praise, just that critics are a lot more forgiving of SRK films than they are of Akshay Kumar films. Akshay Kumar puts in a tour-de-force performance as TMK, charming, sexy, and completely in control but still that’s not enough for the critics. What did they want from him? To be Shahrukh Khan? They are two completely different actors with different styles – comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Shahrukh has a tenderness and sweetness to his acting where Akshay is more bombastic and aggressively physical. For example, in the “Bade Dilwala” song, you can see him bite Katrina’s ear, I mean he really nibbles on it. That’s not an acting choice Shahrukh would have made, but does that make it wrong? (I, for one, thought it was super sexy.)
And where Shahrukh puts a lot of emotion in his face and voice, Akshay is more of a full body actor. In the scene where TMK is trying to convince Aatish Kapoor to join his film shooting and gets him all whipped up into an Oscar™ frenzy, Akshaye raises his hands over his head in celebration and Akshay deliberately echoes him but hilariously leaves his arms in the air just a beat too long as he turns and is confronted by Akshaye’s secretary. Again, I’m not saying that one is better than the other, just that the choice of Akshay in the role makes for a very different kind of film than Om Shanti Om was. And as for the story, unlike OSO or MHN, TMK doesn’t have a personal storyline. Where OSO and MHN were about the main character’s (Shahrukh Khan in both cases) personal journey and his personal emotions, Tees Maar Khan is a set piece, moved along through gears and levers. Does it matter how or why TMK calls up Salman Khan for an Eid song during December? No, not really, we’re just glad to see it. Is the whole making a film within a film contrived? Obviously. Do I care? No, of course not. It’s a farce; of course events are going to be manipulated for maximum comedic effect. You have to just go with it—it’s a different style of filmmaking but it’s not wrong. Again, look at Half Ticket—did it have zero emotional resonance and extremely contrived characters? Sure! But it’s still funny and worth watching. We get a few flashes of emotions here or there, all coming from TMK’s growing bond with the villagers, but for the most part, the main drive of the film is the meta-narrative FU aimed at the pretentious tone of contemporary Bollywood. Towards the end of the film, TMK is in custody and he asks his henchmen to take care of something for him. “Ma?” asks one. “No,” he replies. “Cine-ma.” The world is bigger than the small films coming of Bollywood recently and mass audiences still crave films that provide something that will transcend daily life instead of getting bogged in the details—films like Endhira or Magadheera. Obviously there will always be a place for ‘international’ films that win Oscars™ but what about regular folks? Are they supposed to go line up to get depressed at Dhobi Ghat (the trailer for which played before TMK)? I’m sure it’s going to be a great film but reveling in the mundane details of contemporary life is not something that everybody wants from a trip to the cinema. The desire for films that touch on Magadheera-style transcendence has been so strong that even films which are good but not amazing like Dabangg, which heavily drew on recycled Southern masala conventions, have been pounced on like manna from heaven. Critics need to take a good hard look at who they are actually reviewing films for. We are not all easily offended little girls on our way to a tea party who will faint at a sexy pelvic thrust from Akshay Kumar. Things can be politically incorrect without being hateful; jokes can hinge on pratfalls without being insulting to our intelligence; and you can make a good movie without having it be about the hero’s personal growth or his unrequited love. I’m not saying that everybody has to like Tees Maar Khan but it’s not fair to jump on it because it’s a farce that doesn’t star Shahrukh Khan and isn’t Om Shanti Om 2. And it’s certainly not the worst film of the century, a charge I have seen thrown around from irate commenters on Twitter. What people want to write on their blogs is fine. It’s what I do –I’m not pretending to be impartial. But reviewers, who are supposed to be objective, need to take the sticks out of their butts and recognize that they aren’t doing anything worthwhile by trashing a film simply because it wasn’t to their sense of humor. (And if I’m going to be completely honest, I didn’t find OSO all that emotionally resonant, although MNH, rooted in the 90s soft-focus Karan Johar genre, is very sentimental. Of Farah’s three films, TMK is now my favorite.)
(Originally posted December 25, 2010)