Tashan

What worked:

• music and background score; it's one of Vishal-Shekhar's best albums so far. The songs are beautiful, shot beautifully but the problem is they have got very little to do with the narrative and flow of the movie.
• ensemble cast; it's a good mix of characters. Bachhan Pandey is the only character that stood in the movie, which isn't great but relatively better than other characters.

What did not work:

• everything else; the action scenes are horrible though the set design is impressive. The screenplay is poor so is the execution. The makers could have choreographed the action scenes better which would make it a better watch. We have to say it's a missed opportunity, a few ones that could have defined the genre in the industry. The narrative is poor and questionable. Cinematography is okay. We expected much more from the movie considering a great cast. Their role could have been written and executed properly. Sadly, the movie is full of plot holes and loopholes, and we can question the authenticity and the reasoning behind many scenes in the movie. On conclusion, poor direction.

After an intriguing opening twenty minutes, 'Tashan' stops making any sense. Saif Ali Khan has a weak role and does little with it. Akshay Kumar rise above the script and remains watchable. Anil Kapoor is disastrously bad. He mumbles his lines and his Hindi-English dialog simply annoys. The makers clearly forget about the script. They seem to have spent all their time on the look of the film. Yes, it IS stylish and the visuals are nice, but the film simply doesn't work. The songs are mediocre but well shot. A few numbers could have been cut. A disappointment.

Overall 3/10

I won't call myself a pro, or even anywhere close to a pro when it comes to movies, though I am an absolute freak. I tend to watch movies for what they are.. and am very happy to say more often than necessary that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and how good a thing it is that I am entitled to mine. Generally,I am not a huge fan of Hindi movies. They often lack originality and tend to get overtly pretentious, as in, always pretending very hard to be what they are not. SADLY enough audiences of Hindi movies are so foiled and shaped by now, to this sad sad story, that when a movie actually is what it says it is and hits them in the face with it, THEY TAKE OFFENCE! TASHAN is exactly what it says it is..The style..the look...the formula! It is a movie that has every clichéd formula ever invented solely in Bollywood. The traitor and villainous Antagonist, murdering the true kingpin and taking care of the King pin's orphan with bad intentions of course, armed with clichéd dialogue,Horrible accent, and inferiority complex too. The Beautiful babe who is a slippery vixen with revenge on mind and seduction as a second nature.

The "Accha" guy, who is straight as an arrow, "izzat bachanay wala", hard on the outside, soft and mushy on the inside and yes an exceptionally good fighter bulletproof unless in love. Then the outsider who is unknowing of the ways of the crime-world, lured into the middle of the whole thing only to understand that the whole game stands on his shoulders. The Bachpan ki mohabbat, the heroine ki "chaalbaazi", the villain ki "neeyat kharabi"..the goons , the guns, the knives. The whole frigging formula!

Someone said before me that the movie is ahead of its time..it surely is, people still believe in all of real films that invented these formulas to not find them funny when they are mocked so loudly.

Performances are super bollywood class! Anil Kapoor is perfect. Akshay Outdoes himself. Saif is truly jazzy and Kareena is the perfect femme fatale, she is perfectly wearing the skin of her character as is everyone else. She looks lovely, though I like her better with her original body size. The locations, the cinematography everything is great except some flaws in the special effects section, but dare I say that that is also more like staying in character of Bollywood films..ALWAYS LESS THAN CONVINCING SPECIAL EFFECTS. Music is delicious as well as very original. The best thing in the end I would say for sure is the TASHAN of it all that ties it together nicely. For me it Turned out to be really fun. For a neutral watcher Tashan is all that it says it is...please read the tag-line, grab some popcorn and enjoy this true bollywood joyride of a stylish spoof. Its Amar Akbar Anthony meets Racey Dhoom...and all that came in between.

I totally disagree with the ratings and think that its not justified. though the movie had its good and bad parts overall the movie is in fact very good. On the negative side the action scenes were totally unrealistic, totally clichéd where our main leads are showered with bullets but escape without a scratch while bad guys and pathetic side actors fall like a bunch of leaves in autumn. But on the positive side the acting was really great especially by Akshay Kumar, Kareena looked smoking hot, Saif, though not a significant role, did good justice to his part and last but not the least Anil Kapoor who was brilliant with his bihari hinglish. The music is top notch with lots of catchy songs. I really think the positives far outweigh the negatives of this movie. If you really want to watch a movie which is funny, stylish and added to that some amazing music and cinematography then you cannot miss this movie.

Summer season is here when the choices in the cinemas are limited to what's the hottest movie of the week, given 99.9% of the screens dedicated to screening it. OK, so I may exaggerate on the percentage, but you get my drift. Besides stuff from Hollywood, Bollywood too have their own share of highly anticipated blockbusters, and from some of the trailers shown, I'm hyped to watch them too. Tashan was billed as one of THE most highly anticipated for 2008, but I was quite surprised at the lower than low turnout at the cinemas. When I watched Jodha Akbar, it was a full house, but it wasn't for Tashan.

After watching it, I knew why. It was entertaining, but it was fundamentally weak. Just like it's literal English title, which means "Style", Tashan is all style, but little substance. Not that it doesn't have the usual star power, but scenes felt forced, and some bordered on a tad ridiculous, even for Bollywood standards I must say. Which is quite surprising given that Tashan is directed and written by Vijay Krishna Acharya, who wrote Dhoom and Dhoom 2, both of which I enjoyed tremendously.

In his rookie directorial outing with Tashan, while you can't fault his direction, you'd probably scratch your head over the plot, which was clunky at best. It tried to force too many things into the story, though credit be given where it allowed you some avenue to question character motivation, but that came a little too late, and only toward the finale, which left you guessing for just a moment before it latched into full blown action mimicking many a Thai action movie, with Hong Kong's wirework and Hollywood's ludicrous firearms and gunplay with zero recoil. And in a bid to include everything including the kitchen sink, you have an assortment of vehicles appearing, and the one that took the cake, in a Dhoom 2 homage, was the jetski boat in the middle of nowhere.

At best, Tashan can be enjoyed as unintentional comedy, and this is attributed to how the cast hammed up with their characters. Saif Ali Khan plays Jimmy Cliff, a call center executive who gives English tuition, only as a platform for fishing out new girlfriend material. His playboy ways gets junked aside when he meets with Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor), who's not exactly who she seems, the meek and sweet natured hottie. She engages Jimmy's services for her boss, mobster Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor), who probably gets most of the laughs as he speaks broken English and phrases must like how an ah-beng does it. And to complete the quartet, Akshay Kumar plays Bachchan Pandey, an illiterate gangster for hire who got engaged by Bhaiyyaji to hunt down Jimmy and Pooja when they escape with money stolen from Bahiyyaji's business.

So begins a road trip of sorts, with friends who turned enemies, and enemies whom you know will become friends as the road trip wears on. Jimmy Cliff is probably the most implausible of all, because he goes from zero to hero, executing moves that would shame Rambo, in absolutely no time, which is quite out of character. Kareena Kapoor amps up the sex factor as she uses her charms to guile both men, and has plenty of opportunity to do so given the much touted bikini scenes, and other costumes that boast of plunging necklines or hemlines way above the knee. Every character has a backstory created, and I thought Akshay Kumar's Bachchan Pandey was probably the best, the most touching and the most fun of the lot, even though his character seemed a lot like a non-green Incredible Hulk with his gravity-defying leaps and power packing punches. His wounds also heal automatically, which impressively puts Wolverine to shame. And the best part is his theme song, which is damn alpha-male and played in ra-ra mode each time he takes on adversaries.

But sad to say, that's the only tune that is memorable, something that cheers "Bachchan- Pandey-Bachchan-Pandey". For most Bollywood movies I watch, I will usually be able to, despite the obvious language gaps, emerge from screenings humming a tune or two. I wasn't able to do that after Tashan, because the songs unfortunately just weren't catchy at all. Usually the song/dance routine works well into the storyline without any necessity to bring the characters out of the current scene or location. That I enjoy, versus plucking them out and plonking them into extreme settings high atop a mountain, or atop jagged rocks on the beach front.

Tashan probably didn't take itself too seriously, but coming from Vijay Krishna Acharya's story, you probably wanted something a little more decent rather than the ridiculous, and for continuity to be a little more careful as well. Billed as a blockbuster, now I can start to understand why the crowds have already shunned this one. Despite Akshay Kumr stealing the show, Tashan could have been better on the whole.