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A veteran filmmaker close to Shah Rukh Khan was said to have watched his overkill with growing concern. When SRK went into an overdrive to promote Ra.One, to the extent that some of his own fans and audience began to switch channels exhausted with the sheer overexposure of the star, the filmmaker, it is whispered, had a word with the actor. “What are you up to Shah Rukh,” the filmmaker is believed to have asked him. Shah Rukh’s answer was even more cause for alarm: his quest was to ensure that Ra.One got a better opening than Bodyguard since first day collections indicate the star power more than the drawing power of the film itself. The battle was not to make the better film but to show “my daddy’s bigger than yours”.
It is this immature race for numbers that’s really doing all these big guys in. Everybody is talking numbers today (how much it cost, the opening collections, first weekend revenue and so on); nobody seems to talk about the film itself (how good the story was, how perfect the screenplay and so on). This is the whole rationale behind the film trade crowing that Ra.One had 100 per cent collections on opening day when I personally went online at 3pm on Diwali day and found tickets freely available at a Mumbai multiplex. Even at show time, the hall had more empty rows than full. This is not to say that Ra.One won’t get its opening numbers at all (Diwali is not a day when people flock to the theatres) but the 100 per cent report needs tweaking to get the true figures.
An important point is that Ra.One is only a big gamble and it won’t make any material difference to Shah Rukh’s stardom. Unfortunately, it’s the ego that kicks in, the desperation that he must huff, puff and make it to the finishing line with as much flourish as Salman did with Bodyguard. Most reviews have blasted the film, its seen-many-times-before special effects, the poor caricature of a geeky south Indian in London (Shah Rukh as Shekhar Subramaniam in a curly wig) and the scant attention given to script and cohesive screenplay. Nobody has pointed this out. But in the film, after a grand product launch party followed by a fatal accident in which Shekhar is killed, his mangled car is fished out, then there is his coffin and funeral. So by the time bereaved widow Kareena is seen in a roomful of neatly packed cartons after deciding to fly out to India, one could logically presume that several days must have elapsed. But the scene cuts to her son reaching his dad’s office where his colleague Shahana Goswami goes tut-tut, what happened, at the completely destroyed workstation. Does that mean that between the launch party and the child reaching the office, nobody went to work at all and nobody saw that the place had been destroyed? Then again, something as vital as Ra.One walking out of the game and stalking the earth with much destruction goes completely unrecorded by anybody in the whole wide world except the three key characters.
Utterly unbelievably scripted, if only Shah (as his pals in the trade business have begun to address him) had given as much attention to the story and screenplay as he did to outdo Salman Khan, perhaps his ambitious Ra.One would not have been as much of a disappointment as it has eventually turned out to be.
A lot of reviews have picked child artiste Armaan Verma for praise because he does a cute turn as Shah Rukh’s son Prateek in Ra.One. But one person in the audience chuckled that Prateek’s hairstyle bears a close resemblance to Farah Khan’s husband, Shirish Kunder’s long straight locks. Those who know the people around Shah Rukh, however, can see the obvious inspiration for the character of Prateek: it is not Khan’s own son Aryan but his close friend Ahaan Panday (Chunky Panday’s 11-year-old nephew) who has inspired the schoolboy gaming enthusiast who’s brilliant with the virtual world.
Meanwhile, Salman Khan has the last laugh this time around. For one, Shah’s desperation to beat his numbers has been laughable. And two, Yashraj, the big daddy of Hindi cinema who never touched Salman all these years, is bending over backwards to please him. Apart from shuffling his dates around (understandably, to accommodate his surgery and health issues), they have even allowed him to get a song recorded by his favourite composers Sajid-Wajid and sung the way Salman wanted Shaan to. Never mind if Yashraj had Pritam signed for Ek Tha Tiger, it’s Salman’s growl that’s heard all the way.
