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 Film: "Shaka Laka Boom Boom"; Cast: Bobby Deol, Upen Patel, Kangana Ranaut, Celina Jaitley; Director: Suneel Darshan; Rating: * Strange things happen in this tale of two musicians, who are absolute megalomaniacs, and their ego clashes.
When
Kangana, playing a ping-pong ball to the two, decides to succumb to the
senior musician's sexual advances, she decides to nearly strip right
there in the hallway with the valet looking down at his feet. We second
the valet's emotion.
You watch this laugh triangle with a deep
sense of embarrassment and regret. This could have been the
comprehensive film about the competitiveness that destroys the very
core of creativity.
Bobby is the senior musician in "Shaka
Laka Boom Boom" who gets jealous of the smug and cocky new kid on the
block played by Upen Patel.
The whole ego tussle between the
junior and senior musicians echoes the rivalry between Antonio Salieri
and Amadeus Mozart. The bits and pieces of life's less spoken drama are
turned into a cacophonic celebration of envy and pride, decorated in
colours so garish they could make you blind.
And you could go
deaf with all the noise that Himesh Reshammiya, Viju Shah (background
score) and writer Anurag Kashyap hurl at us.
Surprisingly for a
film so steeped in high-drama, there's little motivation for the
characters. The crucial jealousy and rivalry between the two musicians
is dealt within a few lengthy sequences that are written in the style
of random episodes from long-running soap operas.
Bobby conveys angst in some of the scenes. But most of the time he's grappling for a graph.
Upen
Patel has a strongly written role, but little to match his
embarrassingly high confidence level. He messes up his role with a
double dose of self-confidence.
Kangana Ranaut, who was so
watchable in her earlier films, looks shockingly lost and washed-out
here. Wrong make-up, wrong motivations and wrong film lady!
Celina Jaitley, playing a journalist who sleeps with anyone she writes about, appears almost brain dead.
The marginal characters include Bobby's two sidekicks Asrani and Vivek Vaswani, and his music baron boss Dalip Tahil.
Suneel Darshan probably means well but ends up creating a ritzy mess of the film.
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service
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