There are a few things you just don't try in India.
1. Farce: It's never easy to make a farce, let alone make a farce that a mass audience will gladly lap up. Why not? Well, name one farce that you actually remember that was made in India. Ok, now that you have barely found one or two after much thought, let's shortlist it to one that made truckloads of money. No, Gadar was not a farce. Also, most people probably even don't know that farce is a legitimate sub-genre of comedy.
2. Films About Films: Ok, Om Shanti Om … directed by Farah Khan herself. But that had Shah Rukh Khan and every other star from Bollywood's telephone directory making a cameo and taking many digs at the most worshipped stars from the business. What are the chances it would still work without SRK, without the whole galaxy of star cameos or even half the irreverence that Om Shanti Om had?
3. Remake a flop film: Okay, now this is really pushing your luck. You pick a farce, don't cast your lucky charm despite the film demanding a Khan and worse, pick a film that didn't do well in the first place, don't bother changing it much except adapting it to the Indian milieu. The original Peter Sellers-starrer After The Fox , directed by Vittorio De Sica, itself had a botched up climax… So how do you stay loyal to a flawed film?
4. THE Item Song 20 minutes into the film: Why would people want to stay once they have seen ‘Sheila Ki Jawani'?
5. Hype, then pre-empt reviews and defend the film saying it's for the people and not for critics. Now, that's just invitation for a massacre of your work.
So yes, Hats off to Farah Khan for doing a few things that are considered suicide. Too bad the writing doesn't back her vision up nor does the cast have the energy and charm required of such an endeavour. The jokes are silly and this is not necessarily a bad thing if you have an actor who can bring the corniest line alive. Shah Rukh Khan could do that. Not this Tees Maar Khan who only speaks in forced, contrived analogies. To borrow one from the film, saving a mistress's honour and/or reviewing Tees Mar Khan are equally futile.
She does stay quite loyal to the original and makes only a few cosmetic changes. The sister is now the girlfriend, the MacGuffin has to be robbed off a train and not a ship, it's an Oscar-hungry hero here, not an aging star, and the villains now are conjoined twins.
Within the framework of the remake, Farah throws in some moments of pure fun — like Katrina having a Marilyn Monroe moment with her skirt, the twins wondering why their informer didn't tell them the score or more about the match and just hung up abruptly saying Over and Out, Akshaye Khanna sulking watching Anil Kapoor's Oscar glory and abusing his manager for mistaking Danny Boyle for Danny Denzongpa when approached for Slumdog Millionaire or Akshay Kumar breaking Salman Khan's hug with Katrina at the end of a song and yes, that delightfully energetic ‘Sheila Ki Jawani', of course.
So there are at least a dozen gags that will make you laugh but the point is from Farah, we expect a lot, qualitatively and quantitatively, more.
There's this just brilliant dig at the neo-realistic art-house cinema when the film within the film ends with a voyeuristic camera catching a sight of a villager who flees from the fields, holding the mug before The End sign comes up abruptly.
Farah obviously does not care much for that. She cares for Happy Endings. The film wouldn't win awards, so what? She would give everyone in her crew a statuette. Do stay till the very end to see what happens to her award. Now, that's a statement by itself. And, that's the Farah we know.
Tees Maar Khan
Genre: Comedy
Director: Farah Khan
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Akshaye Khanna, Arya Babbar, Raghu Ram, Rajiv Laxman
Storyline: A master thief plans a fake movie shoot in a village to rob a train full of national treasure from the police
Bottomline: A loyal After The Fox remake minus the regular Farah Khan-Shah Rukh Khan magic
