{"id":183098,"date":"2013-08-17T05:10:39","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T23:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=183098"},"modified":"2013-08-17T05:10:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T23:40:39","slug":"film-review-chennai-express","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/film-review-chennai-express\/","title":{"rendered":"[Film Review] Chennai Express"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chennai<\/a>For months now \u2014 though it felt more like years \u2014 the gossip rags have gone on and on about the great rivalries, real and imagined, between the makers of\u00a0Chennai Express\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!<\/i>, the two massive Bollywood productions originally scheduled for an Eid release date. Ultimately, like much else in the country, it was a conflict about real estate: getting your movie to as many screens as possible in order to make as much money as possible. Now that Raj Thackeray (PBUH) has intervened and convinced Ekta Kapoor and Co to move their release to next week, the field has been left open to Messrs Shetty and Khan to capitalise. Which they most certainly have done, raking in almost Rs\u00a090 crore by Saturday itself in almost 4000 screens in India and more overseas, the biggest weekend opening ever for a Bollywood film.
\nBut here\u2019s the kicker \u2014\u00a0none of this was unexpected. The nature of the game means that all a film like\u00a0Chennai Express\u00a0<\/i>has to do is show up. UTV\u2019s savvy pre-release moves have ensured it released in roughly three times as many screens as\u00a03 Idiots\u00a0<\/i>did \u2014 in some multiplexes, the only competition was that great mass entertainer,\u00a0BA Pass\u00a0<\/i>\u2014 which translated to it making roughly three times as much money in the opening weekend. It looks fairly certain to become India\u2019s greatest ever release.
\nAll this is not to start another vague rant about the commercialisation of Bollywood. By all means,\u00a0Chennai Express\u00a0<\/i>is a fairly run-of-the-mill commercial \u2018mass entertainer\u2019, and should be judged only as such. It certainly has all the flaws of the genre: a wafer-thin plot, blatant product placement, hammy acting, puerile jokes, ridiculous dialogue, a tendency to present alien cultures (for it treats its Tamil characters as just that) with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and a tearjerker finale that feels unreal, unearned and inexplicable. But even allowing for all that, there is much about the film that, much like three-day-old sambar, seems off.
\nMaybe it\u2019s the general lack of exploding trucks. Shetty often seems out of his element by having to tone down his Michael Bey act to satisfy Shah Rukh\u2019s sensibilities, and too often relies on the crutch of referencing SRK films (it\u2019s not a running gag if it\u2019s every other joke). Of course, the film more fits the other kind of cinema he knows how to make, the slapstick comedy, with results that are patchy at best; in any case, the jokes \u2014 which seem meticulously proportioned between high and lowbrow for both single-screen and multiplex audiences \u2014 are a marked improvement from his\u00a0Golmaal\u00a0<\/i>films. Shah Rukh, on his part, plays the blundering buffoon well thanks to his excellent comic timing, especially when he has material to work with, but the numerous catchphrases the script saddles him with make his performance quite tedious by the second half. Padukone looks like she is having fun, even if her accent is a little too Mehmoodesque to be taken seriously.
\nThe mantle of the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever \u2014 one that is by no means a given for\u00a0Chennai Express<\/i>, whose record-breaking run could well be halted when it hands over 40 percent of its screens to\u00a0OUATIMD\u00a0<\/i>\u2014 has been held by some of the industry\u2019s most iconic films. If Shetty\u2019s film does indeed overhaul\u00a03 Idiots\u00a0<\/i>and claim it, it will be by far the most forgettable one to do so (say what you will about\u00a0Gadar<\/i>; it was anything but forgettable). But these films have been testaments to the times they were made in. Perhaps an era characterised by diminishing attention spans and conveyor-belt films deserves a\u00a0Chennai Express\u00a0<\/i>to define it for posterity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even though Chennai Express is a fairly run-of-the-mill commercial \u2018mass entertainer,\u2019 there is much about the film that seems off<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":183125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,7652,7548,8051,8375,8376],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}