7. Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam
Next to Priyanka, probably the biggest bringer of disappointments this year must have been Mallika Sherawat and one of those was the film Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam . Clearly she was working hard at this stage to at least beat Priyanka at something – even if it was the biggest number of turkeys in a year. Once again, the problem with this movie was that an excellent one-line concept had not been supported by a script that requires a decent structure for a 150-minute movie. I suspect that Mallika sees an outline proposal that says ‘Lead actress looks sexy’ and she leaps up and says, ‘That’s it! That’s me! I must have that role! This is going to be such a great movie – because it has me in it looking sexy!’ The minimum rules are actually fairly simple for a Bollywood movie – five acts, a plot and two sub-plots, protagonist and antagonist, the CART imperative (Comedy, Action, Romance and Tragedy in equal amounts), each act must end with a twist or a cliffhanger, six songs, no new significant characters after halfway – and the tension builds in the final act to a breathtaking climax. Not so hard is it? So how come the writers of this tosh seemed to fail on almost all of these accounts. Mallika’s acting by the way, was again first-class, in her usual sexy, sultry way, though as the film progressed, she appeared to become increasingly desperate – perhaps she’d noticed her contract had a ‘no escape’ clause. What was Rahul Bose doing here by the way? He certainly wasn’t acting – perhaps he just popped in to offer some moral support.
A relatively small budget movie, this was nevertheless a box-office disaster taking less than 2 cr at the box office.
