Singh is Bliing *
Dir: Prabhudheva.
With: Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Kay Kay Menon, Lara Dutta. 140 mins. Cert: 12A
Bollywood can be a confusing
place. All parties involved are insistent that Singh is Bliing [sic], a goofy comedy starring Akshay Kumar as a
beturbanned toughnut named Singh, has nothing whatsoever to do with 2008’s Singh is Kinng, a goofy comedy that
starred Akshay Kumar as a beturbanned toughnut named Singh. Yet the
similarities of tone and title are such one wonders whether some
behind-the-scenes legal finagling has obliged the new film’s creatives to adopt
an alternative trajectory. There is, after all, a fair amount here with which
you wouldn’t want to be associated: even by Kumar’s lowly standards, it’s
pretty inane stuff.
Kumar gave a laudably
serious, committed performance in August’s prominent flop Brothers, but his follow-up looks very much like a reversion to
give-‘em-what-they-want type. Singh 2.0 – the raffish Raftaar – is a touch
Sandlerish: an inveterate party boy, introduced flunking a zookeeper gig.
Dispatched to Goa by despairing parents, he’ll eventually assume some
responsibility as protector to Sara, daughter of a marked businessman; she’s
played by the pouty, Isle of Man-born Amy Jackson, another of those
English-speaking Bollywood performers who appear never to have spoken a
sentence of English in their lives. (Her slo-mo emergence from the ocean in a Baywatch-red swimsuit suggests the
producers had other reasons for casting her.)
Director
Prabhudheva’s idea of comedy is broad and very much soundtrack-led. Limping
gags are punched up with incessant use of the penny whistle; barely a scene
passes without someone having a flowerpot or bottle smashed over their head, or
– introducing a more exotic note – a coconut slammed into their unmentionables.
Right from the title’s extra “i”, everyone’s overcompensating for a lack of
substance and sense: I could understand the second-act inclusion of Sara’s
quest to find her mother – it offers the illusion of sincerity – but the
running non-joke about her sleepwalking translator is anyone’s guess, and
stop-offs in a damp Romania scream either “tax incentive” or “directorial
concussion”.
Everything gives the
impression of having been thrown together on the spot: it’s amateur hour,
stretched over three. This Singh, never more than a succession of bright
headscarves, makes his predecessor in
Kinng seem fully rounded; the action looks under-rehearsed; the songs,
composed in a key of screeching pastiche, are dire. What’s most confounding
isn’t, ultimately, the film’s status as sequel or standalone; it’s the
relentless vapidity, which defies all known laws of physics. There it is on
screens across the country, around the globe – so it must exist in some form –
but there’s so little to it, and so much of that. It is, whatever its genesis,
a big nothiing.
Singh is Bliing is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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