Movie Review: Happy New Year

Rating: **1/2
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Abhishek Bachchan, Sonu Sood, Boman Irani, Vivaan Shah

Director: Farah Khan

Language: Hindi

Farah Khan’s Happy New Year is a confused mess. It can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a cheeky sendup of popular Hindi film clichés, a revenge heist drama or a redemptive story of losers getting a chance to shine. Broadly, it charts the journey of Charlie (an extremely hammy Shah Rukh Khan), whose full name is…wait for it… Chandramohan Manohar Sharma. A former Boston university topper, Charlie’s father (played by Anupam Kher) was wrongly convicted of a diamond theft by a devious international crook Charan Grover ( Jackie Shroff).

True to Hindi film tradition, Charlie decides he wants to get even with Grover and enlists a ragtag group of losers, who must win an international dance competition in Dubai in order to steal a highly precious set of diamonds that Grover has been entrusted with guarding. The crew includes Mohini (Deepika Padukone), a bar dancer with a heart of gold, no-good street ruffian Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan) , Tammy (Boman Irani), a Parsi safecracking genius, a former armyman Jagmohan (Sonu Sood, whose overly buff phyisque is played up for laughs at every juncture) and Rohan, a hacking wonder boy (Vivaan Shah).

Khan, whose nudge-nudge, wink-wink humour worked in films like Om Shanti Om, takes it too far here. Oh look, a Parsi man who lives in mortal fear of his mother and gets epileptic fits — isn’t that funny? If that’s not hilarious, then surely the sight of Bachchan throwing up without any warning should be. The only one who manages to milk some laughs out of her character is Padukone. The sequences where she drifts into a swoony daze whenever Khan’s Charlie starts to speak in English genuinely hit the mark. But such moments are rare in this relentlessly loud pastiche. The ultimate joke of Happy New Year is on you, the viewer.