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The last time 92 minutes felt this never-ending was when Sir Geoffrey Boycott was at the batting crease, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was behind the microphone and Michael Chang and Sergi Bruguera were rallying at Roland Garros.
Despite Sunny Leone’s bust, er best, efforts, Jackpot is as long, as clumsy and as fake as Naseeruddin Shah’s dreadlocks in the film. A decade after his career went Boom, Kaizad Gustad has chewed up a few crores from Gutkha Raja Sachiin Joshi to spit out a retelling of his very own Bombay Boys.
Naseeruddin Shah’s Boss is just an older version of Don Mastana, his Mumbhai from Gustad’s 1998 breakthrough film, and if Tara Deshpande played the moll in Bombay Boys, it’s Sunny side up here. And Joshi, who owns the crore-guzzling Goa Gutkha, plays a con artiste in the film out to steal five crore from a casino in Goa!
That’s not the jackpot our little masters Sachiin and Sunny are after, though. They are in their very own bad acting competition, each worse than the other... scene for scene, scene after scene. Every Sachiin-Sunny moment in Jackpot is like an antithesis of that restaurant rendezvous of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. A textbook of how not to act.
At the centre of it all is a game of poker. Sunny’s Maya has worked for five years in casinos in Vegas and she claims that “card-counting se hum yeh game jeet sakte hain”! Well, Maya Memsaab must have been busy entertaining guests in Sin City because the only game where you can count cards is blackjack.
And then she adds: “Hearts aur diamonds dono laal hai — zyada difference nahin hai!” No wonder a man looks a little below her neck and concludes: “Tera poora dimaag idhar hai naa?”
The funniest scene in the film is when Sunny comes charging at Sachiin on his boat asking about the whereabouts of the money. They are pushing each other when suddenly she starts taking off her waistcoat and her shoes. It’s like: “Guys, you are forgetting why you hired me!” Gutkha Raja opens a couple of buttons of her top as an afterthought and then she shows her brains.
A Bond-like opening credits song, a hop-and-skip non-linear narrative, split-up chapters with titles, pop-up music videos... Ustad Gustad “raises the stakes” and goes “all in” but with such legendary acting spread across the table, it spells “flop” at every “turn”.
Naseer, of course, doesn’t give a damn. He looks and sounds as disinterested as a baby watching a Sunny Leone film. And like all great actors, he brings the bar down to match his fabulous co-actors. What to do? Even the lizard he stabbed in Bombay Boys emoted better than the leads here.
Sachiin Joshi has enough money to produce and release these home videos. Sunny Leone needs this money to not do any more of her home videos. And you are better off ‘home’, with a Casino ‘video’.
