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The versatile Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who co-starred with Salman Khan in Kick and is due to reunite with the superstar in the upcoming Bajrangi Bhaijaan, had posed a pertinent question to this correspondent a few months back: "Why do the films of the Bollywood superstars need so much promotion if they really have clout?" Why indeed? The answer is obvious: an execrably bad Bollywood film featuring a superstar needs all the marketing push that it can muster in order to make a boxoffice killing before the audience cotton on to the fact they are being grossly short-changed. In the past few months, the Mumbai movie industry has foisted an entire bunch such trashy big-budget blockbusters on us — Kick, Holiday — A Soldier is Never Off Duty, Singham Returns, Entertainment, Bang Bang and Happy New Year. It hasn’t been a happy time for moviegoers looking for quality cinema. The last-named title, directed by Farah Khan and starring Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) and Deepika Padukone, is being touted as a film that is on a record-breaking run. It is reported to have collected an unprecedented Rs 45 crore on its opening day and raced past the Rs 100-crore mark quicker than any other Hindi film in history. SRK is still the undisputed badshah of the boxoffice, we are being told. But all the grand figures that are being cited by the film’s publicists cannot conceal the undeniable truth: Happy New Year is a cynical travesty of a movie designed simply to inveigle the more gullible among India’s moviegoers to part with their hard-earned money. Happy New Year arrived in the multiplexes on the back of an extremely aggressive publicity campaign that began well in advance of the release date. Every medium — print, radio, television — was exploited to get the word out about an ageing superstar’s brand new potboiler. SRK appeared on reality shows alongside the director and his co-stars to appeal for support in the manner of a politician worried about the laws of diminishing returns.
The fierce competition among Bollywood’s top boxoffice powerhouses — Salman, Shah Rukh, Hrithik, Akshay — is only pulling commercial Hindi cinema down into the pits in terms of quality. Somebody described Happy New Year as "Ocean’s Eleven rehashed by a baboon" or something to that effect. Not an iota of exaggeration there. That is how bad the film is! If Happy New Year is indeed as massive a hit as it is being made out to be, the conclusion that might be drawn is that no matter how awful a film is, it can rake in big bucks provided it has an A-list star on board and plenty of money to splurge on pre-release promotion and publicity.
But that inference might not be all that true. Films like Kick, Singham Returns, Bang Bang and Entertainment, for all the money that they mopped up from the market, did not actually soar quite to the extent that these films were expected to. By all legitimate yardsticks, these were boxoffice underperformers. As things stand, it is no big deal anymore to make Rs 100 crore and more. Every other Bollywood release seems to be doing that these days. Bang Bang had everything going for it. The cast of this over-the-top Knight and Day remake included Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif, the hottest Bollywood screen couple in the current scenario. Why then did the film fail to get the full bang for its buck? What the makers forgot to inject into Bang Bang was logic. It eventually turned to be a series of tacky action sequences strung together simply for the purpose of delivering cheap thrills. Much the same was true of Singham Returns. With Ajay Devgn reprising the role of the no-nonsense police officer who struck a chord with the masses the first time around, it generated much excitement among fans of high-octane cop dramas — which drove the early boxoffice collections — but the mass enthusiasm tapered off once it became clear that the film had nothing new to offer. The Akshay Kumar-starrer Holiday — A Soldier is Never Off Duty suffered the same fate. The Prabhu Deva-directed film sought to bank solely on the actor’s proven star power. But that simply wasn’t enough to deflect attention from the film’s obvious lack of quality. The other big Akshay Kumar vehicle of the year, Entertainment, was much worse. The film saw the Bollywood star sharing screen space with a canine actor — and the latter, a loveable labrador, ended up scoring more brownie points than the human members of the cast. As things are poised to go from bad to worse, the question that arises is, will the Bollywood superstars never again deliver films that scrape the bottom of the barrel? All hope now rests on Aamir Khan and his PK.
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