Tees Maar Khan & Akshay Kumar’s mysterious enchainment

Spoofing an Akshay Kumar comedy is a rather hazardous enterprise. So many of the star’s hits in this genre run close to parody anyway and therefore when a film adopts the latter approach there can be the sense of pointlessness. This was certainly true for Chandni Chowk to China. It was only partially true for Tashan which was saved by some of its tonal inconsistencies (it was sometimes spoof and sometimes not!). No such luck however with Tees Maar Khan though this is hardly the greatest of the film’s oddities. One would have expected Farah Khan, after her first two successful films, to better appreciate the importance of a framing narrative in her sort of bastardized masala, especially with her blockbuster ambitions. But somehow she has drawn the worst lessons from Om Shanti Om. Here in Tees Maar Khan all pretense of a ‘plot’ has more or less been shunned for a full blown parody that weirdly enough is so incomplete an effort that it comes across as a trailer of a film. It is not an unwatchable movie by any means but it completely refuses any level of involvement by the viewer. It is as if Farah Khan decided that the circus elements of Om Shanti Om were more than enough to sustain a film with Akshay Kumar and then proceeded to direct this extremely half-hearted effort where hardly any feature from the caper sequences to the song videos registers any impact.

Somewhere along the way Akshay Kumar’s very prolific and prolifically successful reinvention got wildly derailed. The comedy genre over the last two decades, first by way of David Dhawan’s films and then Akshay Kumar’s recent efforts, has more or less represented the detritus of Manmohan Desai’s comic adventures with Amitabh Bachchan. In truth Desai’s own later films were increasingly reliant on his megastar’s ‘one man industry’ phase to make up for the script deficit and more generally the director’s overall careless handling of these projects. All sins seemed pardonable with the viewers as long as Bachchan carried the load. Not just Desai but various other directors in the 1980s also succumbed to this laziness. But in any case these were films that were essentially comedies with the pretense of a framing narrative but this latter bit was just about enough to keep the show going.

In the 1990s David Dhawan came to maturity as a filmmaker reworking this rather tired terrain but he was blessed with a comic actor in Govinda who could again elevate a number of humdrum efforts. Dhawan learnt a great deal from Desai. From the fluid whackiness of Aankhen (possibly the director’s best effort) to the uneasy comedy-drama mixture of Raja Babu to the later subversive (and underrated) efforts of Hum Kissise Kum Nahin and Yeh Hai Jalwa Dhawan more or less did it all. Dhawan also had another side to him where a more Hrishikesh Mukherjee inspired ‘comedy of errors’ situational sort of comedy was incorporated into a Desai universe. Two good examples in this regard were Saajan Chale Sasural and the vastly more over the top Biwi No 1. Additionally there were moments when Dhawan turned to the 1960s and the cinema of Shammi Kapoor, most notably in Haseena Maan Jayegi, for another distinct comedy tradition. Again the debt to Desai was always apparent. And while Dhawan too like any other director had his poor days he did not entirely eschew the idea of a plot. Much like his self-avowed model he always understood that a comedy could often seem rather rudderless and inconsequential without that anchor of a story-line even if of the most perfunctory sort.

Unfortunately this is the one feature that Akshay Kumar’s directors abandoned rather quickly. Rather quickly the actor turned from Priyadarshan’s gentler efforts (even if these were poorer remakes of infinitely superior Malayalam originals) and a half acceptable situational comedy like Heyy Baby to rather messy, slapstick efforts that were literally a series of gags with the oxygen running out relatively soon into the films. Beyond a point each new film seemed to trade in greater ‘outrageousness’ with cell-phones being lost in someone’s stomach to a monkey and human slapping each other. Increasingly Akshay Kumar’s cinema started trading in nonsense. In between there would be more interesting though half-baked attempts at parody. Performing this operation on the actor’s bread and butter films was always a rather delicious absurdity but the deeper point to be made here is that such parody was inherent even in Desai’s original mix. Those films or at least important segments in those works were often situated on this borderline. Dhawan to his credit mostly preserved the balance and when he turned ‘deconstructionist’ on some projects the resulting efforts were wickedly subversive rather than plainly spoofish. Akshay’s comedies over time (barring some exceptions, for example with Anees Bazmee who too is a follower of Desai but a far less inspired one than Dhawan) were just glorified circus acts of a crudeness that one would otherwise only expect to find in minor street theater devoted to laughs. Rather surprisingly, and even with all the box office evidence available to her, Farah Khan nonetheless chose to fashion yet more parody with the actor in an effort that seems strangely sophomoric and significantly inferior to the itself problematic Tashan.

Tees Maar Khan therefore left me a bit astonished. A total blind spot on Farah Khan’s part. It is not only parody that is the issue here (though this would always have been questionable in box office terms) as much as it is the complete lack of directorial control to justify what would seem to be a rather winning combination — a caper film combined with parodic elements. We get then a rather flat film which never quite ‘begins’. One would rather watch this than most of Akshay’s recent comedy oeuvre but that is hardly a compliment. The actor himself seems rather regrettably committed to going down this same exhausted road of comedy and parody in film after film even when box office returns seem to show such extraordinarily diminishing returns. This viewer has for a very long time thought that Akshay should have switched over to masala cinema before all this, a genre which could easily have incorporated his brand of comedy and certainly he could have had some of the box office victories that both Aamir and Salman fashioned for themselves in very different ways. Perhaps the ghost of his 1990s B grade action days continues to haunt Akshay because he has so far chosen not to see the writing on the wall. The action film he’s signed with Prabhudeva or even the riskier affair with Gowariker might be a case of too little too late, specially when those films will still be surrounded by the comedies he does not seem to be giving up on. All actors have to work through their inner demons over time. Lasting success often depends on this kind of self-consciousness. One can only hope that Akshay at least now begins to make the turn that should have happened a long time back. I certainly wish for Akshay Kumar’s viability for many years to come but it is upto to him to reinvent himself once more..