EBolly

Leave your brains behind for “Singh is Kinng”

I don’t think “Singh is Kinng” will fail at the box-office. The film may work for a number of reasons, but content is not one of them.

“Singh is Kinng”, which stars Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif, epitomises the much used phrase for most Bollywood films - leave your brains behind. The director, writers and the actors in this film certainly did.

Kumar plays Happy Singh, a bumbling Sikh in a small village in Punjab. He spends his time chasing hens and generally wreaking havoc.

Fed up of his antics, the villagers send him away to Australia on the pretext of bringing back Lucky Singh (yeah, they got really creative with names in this film), a villager who has become a mafia don Down Under, so that Lucky’s ageing parents can meet him.

Accompanying Happy is his friend, Rangeela, played by Om Puri, (it pains me to see one of India’s best actors stuck in such mindless roles). Somehow the duo land up in Egypt, just long enough for Happy to set his eyes on Sonia (Katrina Kaif), fall in love and do a flashy dance sequence with the pyramids as the backdrop.

Happy now heads to Australia to convince Lucky to give up his erring ways and come back to the village in India.

From here on, the film is a series of accidents, both real and intended. Lucky almost gets killed, Happy takes his place as the King (of what, we are never told) and we realise that random foreigners are trying to kill Happy/Sonia (at this point I didn’t even want to know why).

The climax is predictable. Of the cast, Katrina Kaif performs marvellously - by that I mean she looks ravishing and even manages to speak Hindi, which is what is expected of her anyway. Ranvir Shorey is wasted as her obnoxious fiancé, as is Om Puri. The rest of the supporting cast look the same and act the same, pulling out guns at will and shooting people in crowded malls.

Akshay Kumar is stuck in a role that honestly does nothing for either his comic ability or action skills - but he still performs it with conviction.

Like I said in the beginning, “Singh is Kinng” will probably be liked by a lot of people, and might do well at the box-office. Unfortunately, content is not king here, and our filmmakers seem OK with that.

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