Cash

Dir: Anubhav Sinha

Starring: Suniel Shetty, Ajay Devgan, Dia Mirza, Shamita Shetty, Esha Deol, Zayed Khan, Riteish Deshmukh, and (blink and you miss her) Ayesha Takia

Music: Vishal-Shekhar

Cash follows close on the heels of director Sinha’s last action thriller, Dus (2005), which I dare say is better remembered for its title track than any lasting cinematic value. At face value, the new multi-starrer seems to stay faithful to the tradition of pure-entertainer “cops and robbers” flicks, since it is replete with foreign locations, complicated conspiracies, giant diamonds, high-speed chases, gangsters’ molls, and a web of double-crossing and lies.

The rather convoluted story goes that Doc (alias Karan) (Ajay Devgan) is called in by Uncle’s (Suniel Shetty’s) girlfriend Aditi (Dia Mirza) to pull off an all-but-impossible theft. Uncle wants some diamonds, Doc can make that happen. Doc calls on Lucky (Riteish Deshmukh) and Danny (Zayed Khan) – both of whom are in love with Pooja (Esha Deol), a lawbreaker in her own right – to help him execute the theft.

However, things start to go wrong, because of Shania (Shamita Shetty), who is Doc’s girlfriend and a keeper of the law. Giving away more would be a shame… because there isn’t much more to give away of the highly-predictable storyline. 

Now, questions abound: Why bother with the love triangle given the film’s chosen narrative method of retrospective explanation and flashback? Why call the movie “Cash” if it’s really all about the diamonds? Why don’t these top-class robbers do their homework before agreeing to a problematic deal? How does everyone manage to get around town so quickly and conveniently using four or five different means of transportation that were never pre-arranged? It’s enough to boggle the mind, right there, the amount the audience is supposed to take for granted.

But in addition, the inanity factor of the movie is just too high. I’m not usually above laughing at a couple of silly jokes per film, but I found it hard to appreciate two instances of the same monotone Santa-Banta joke at entirely irrelevant moments… Or the yacht manager’s pseudo-gay, pseudo-slapstick stint in a mental hospital. Or Lucky’s somehow-successful incorporation of kabaddi into his thievery. Or the filmmakers’ numerous bloopers (look out for the little black box that repeatedly goes missing from under the bridge Doc is hanging from while he talks Shania out of her car troubles). Or the fact that one of the songs, starring said Shania with red-tinted tresses and unreally-tiny gold clothing, contains the lyrics:

Kise kahoon is dil ko hai tumne aise churaaya

Hai nikle har armaan anokhe, you’re taking me higher

Saiyan saiyan saiyan chhodo mori baiyaan

Ho na jaoon dekho crazy with desire

You’re my mind-blowing mahiya…

Really, the strongest emotion I felt throughout the film was disappointment. More questions. No answers. Like why was Ayesha Takia, who packed a powerhouse performance in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor (2006), not much more than a cutesie talking head on an airplane? Why was Esha Deol – who looked pallid and pancaked with entirely-unsuitable shades of makeup – so overexposed, her toned abs and taut thighs and tiny tops leaping off the screen to offend even such liberal sensibilities as my own? Why do Shania’s own men disregard her orders about touching the plastic airplanes? (I will confess, though: that technological touch was my favorite part of the movie.) Why persist with the mediocre animated inter-cuts so that they are no longer a novelty, and make the audience’s heads spin instead? Why is the punchline of Doc’s Santa-Banta joke completely unintelligible – are we no longer even to be treated to the funnies? Speaking of which, why were the dialogues so uncreative, and the music so jarring to the ears? What was the big deal about shooting the film in South Africa, if there was not much in the film that was location-specific? Why were Uncle’s and the bad guys’ accents so terrible? (South African? Australian? American? English? You decide. It would seem all the villains’ parts are dubbed by call center employees who failed their accent training lessons.)

As I left the cinema, my first thought was, “I want my cash back”. Don’t bother wasting yours on this one.

Movie buff and freelancer Simran Thadani, 24, hails from Bombay, India. She graduated from Wellesley College in 2005, and will begin a Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall.

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