Naveen’s note on Laxmii

In the genre of horror comedy the best i have seen still remains Bhool Bhulaiya and most recently Stree.

I had also liked the tamil movie Kanchana which was a low budget good entertainer (timepass) despite shoddy screenplay.
Thats because Kanchana never had anytjing serious about itself. The characters, issues etc were all cartoonish so overall it worked.
To overcome those gaps in screenplay, significant and serious changes have been made in Laxmii. However the changes needed to be goofy in nature and not serious. This is where the movie goes wrong.

1. The muslim husband in a hindu family is introduced. The girls family has discarded them and they want to win them back. A serious subject but with the kind of humor that this film is about, it doesnt work. In fact it looks farcical and forced.
This fills in a serious lapse in the screenplay of the original but the attempt needed to be true to the goofiness of the characters. Smart and serious topics doesnt exist in such world.

2. Hero in Kanchana was afraid of ghosts. So all silliness despite bad acting still looked tolerable. Here Akshay is in the group that exposes fake babas and dhongis. And he is shown to do serious stuff like citing chemical names of products used by fakes. This is fine but the rest of the caricaturish nature of the film makes anything serious looks misplaced.

3. The scene at the house when Laxmii realises that she has been found and the sequences that follows doesnt work in Laxmii as good as it did in Kanchana. The scenes have been shortened and has been made dramatic with Akshay changing his getup for the 3 character. It did not work.

The last 30 minutes of the climax is true to original when things get serious about transgenders and soon you realise that this is a revenge movie.

Akshay Kumar looks thin, and hence old. His cheekbones have come out because of weight loss. His scenes are not well made. His effort shows but those are not enough.

Kiara is the only good thing i liked. She is the only sane person in the movie. She looks beautiful.

Unlike Kanchana, the performance and comradrie of mother in law and daughter in law doesnt work here in entirety. The actors end of shouting, shrieking and annoying. The family is educated and well off but look, talk and feel bucolic.

Overall, underwhelming.

Rating – 2/5

At boxoffice, it would have been average.