Friday, October 31, 2014

Happy New Year - Review

By Anant Mathur (October 31, 2014)

Over the Last decade I have been really disappointed with Shah Rukh Khan's choice of roles and the films that he's been doing. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed going to a SRK film saying wow what an amazing film, it was probably sometime in the last century. So, when Happy New Year was about to be released I had very low expectations. The good thing about having low expectations when watching a film is that if there's any part of it that's any good you start to enjoy the film. 

So, against my better judgement and on the recommendation of others, I decided to watch Happy New Year. Sadly, aside from a couple of funny moment I was really disappointed, the film was not entertaining at all, the only character that was fun to see was Abhishek Bachchan as Nandu Bhide.

There are several Hollywood films like the Ocean's Trilogy, Flashdance, Now You See Me, etc. which the film takes inspiration from and there's nothing wrong with that as long as the end product is entertaining. The real problem with Happy New Year is that it's not entertaining. The end product is a useless waste of time and makes you wonder why anyone would spend Rs. 125 crores ($20 million) on this desperate attempt at film-making when that money could've been put to better use elsewhere. 

I have never been a fan of the Ocean's Trilogy and Now You See Me was good but it was predictable, I'm not going to comment on how bad Flashdance is. Part of the problem is whenever Bollywood tries to copy a Hollywood film they take the worst films that are outthere and make the story less tolerable. Arguably one of the best heist films is Bob Le Flambeur by Jean-Pierre Melville, if you're going to take inspiration from something that's where you start.

I have watched a lot of good Hollywood heist films and sadly this one is far from being in that category, Jimmy Fallon's Taxi is a better film than Happy New Year and that usually falls under the category of bad heist films, so you can imagine how bad HNY must be if I'm rating it lower than that.


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