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THE SHAUKEENS (U/A)
Director: Abhishek Sharma
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Lisa Haydon, Anupam Kher, Annu Kapoor, Piyush Mishra, Rati Agnihotri
Running time: 125 minutes
Akshay Kumar — playing an alcoholic, boorish, high-strung version of his superstar self — gets drunk at a public event while on a film shoot in Mauritius and makes a nuisance of himself. Hounded at home by the media, his mother-in-law Dimple Kapadia — also playing herself — refuses to comment on the “humiliation”, evading the cameras, getting into her car and rolling up the windows, but not before taking a quick swig from her hipflask!
It’s moments like these that make The Shaukeens — a loud and tasteless reworking of the 1982 Basu Chatterjee film Shaukeen — somewhat bearable. Akshay shows how good he is at laughing himself, letting his self-deprecating humour take centre stage. You chuckle as the Khiladi, after hanging from a helicopter in a film shot, tells his over-enthusiastic director: “Saari umar toh helicopter se hi latakta aaya hoon.” You LOL when he desperately tries to imbibe the intricacies of method-acting for an arthouse Bengali film, his last resort, he believes, to get his hands on that elusive National Award. You ROFL at how easily he flits in and out of character when asked to do a series of extempore brand endorsements. Akshay — the producer of The Shaukeens and featuring in “his most special appearance” — is in top form here. Unfortunately, The Shaukeens isn’t.
Director Abhishek Sharma — the man who gave us the crisp and charming Tere Bin Laden a few years ago — reworks the classic story of three friends in their 60s yearning to spice up their sex lives. Shoe store owner Laali (Anupam Kher) is Ashok Kumar’s Chaudhury from the original, a married man whose deeply religious wife doesn’t even let him touch her; KD (Annu Kapoor) is the wealthy bachelor with a roving eye, a nod to AK Hangal’s Inder Sen, while Pinky (Piyush Mishra), the most mousy of the three like Utpal Dutt’s Jagdish Bhai, is a widower who can’t gather the courage to approach the owner of the Thai massage parlour outside his Chandni Chowk spice shop.
Morning walk to evening drink, the three ogle at women young enough to be their daughters, but aren’t gutsy enough to go further. When an escort service disqualifies them as being too old, the trio decide to go on a holiday looking for sex.
Landing up in Mauritius, the men can’t believe their luck when their homestay owner turns out to be the leggy and lissome Ahana (Lisa Haydon), an aspiring designer — her “best” creations are a jacket made out of a dead monkey and a hat fashioned out of used toothpicks! — whose one desire in life is to meet “superstar Akshay Kumar” who is shooting in the city. The old men, desperate to get lucky with the girl, engage in a game of one-upmanship, pulling out all the stops — good, bad, ugly — to make her meet the man of her dreams.
The charm of Shaukeen lay in the fact that the men in the middle — though desperate — didn’t allow the film to degenerate into a sleaze fest. The Shaukeens, however, tells and shows it as blatantly as it can — from the free use of Viagra to loose talk about women and sex, the three dirty rotten scoundrels do it all. The low point? The three posing in their underwear as the camera lingers on their crotch. Eeeewwww!
Billed a comedy, The Shaukeens has some rare fun moments — the friends stealing into a Mauritius strip club only to find an overweight pole dancer gyrating to Bhojpuri beats is a great touch — but largely fails to bring on the laughs. And that’s because the three men, otherwise fine actors, aren’t in good nick. Particularly Annu Kapoor who was such a delight as the smooth-talking Dr Chaddha in Vicky Donor, but comes a cropper here. Lisa Haydon — who impressed as the free-living Vijaylakshmi in Queen — is reduced to a bimbette here. But boy, can she rock a bikini!
The biggest shame? Rati Agnihotri — the object of lust in the original — is reduced to a crying side player — Kher’s wife — here.
In the end, it’s just Akshay who somewhat rescues The Shaukeens. But that’s just 25 minutes in a 125-minute film. Is that a trip worth taking? You decide.
Shaukeen vs The Shaukeens
• In 1982, the three friends took a road trip to Goa. In 2014, they fly down to Mauritius.
• In 1982, Anita was a singer in a hotel who hit the beach in a swimsuit. In 2014, Ahana is a designer who needs no excuse to slip into a bikini.
• In 1982, Ravi (Mithun Chakraborty) was Anita’s love interest and an
important part of the plot. In 2014, Ahana has just been dumped by her boyfriend who is given one fleeting scene.
