Subhash K Jha turns the focus back on 2001’s AjnabeeAjnabee proved it. The film lets Akshay—and us—down. After the hype surrounding this good looking highly–publicized film, you come away with a sense of anxious disappointment at the muddle that the directorial duo Abbas-Mustan has created within a corny quadrangle of two couples locked in a sexual and moral battle in the deceptive tranquility of a Swiss hamlet.
You’d think Abbas-Mustan have more sense and artistic sensibilities than to adapt a decade-old third-rate Hollywood thriller called Consenting Adults about wife swapping in the American suburbia. Though everyone in Abbas-Mustan’s film including the obnoxious comedians , keeps talking about it constantly , providentially Ajnabee isn’t about the outdated pre-AIDs kink known as wife-swapping.
Not wives, but better sense and good taste are swapped for chic thrills in this feel-cute movie where the newly married couple Raj (Bobby Deol) and Priya (Kareena Kapoor) befriend the reckless hedonists next door Vicky (Akshay Kumar) and Sonia (debutante Bipasha Basu) .
If you’ve seen Akshay being wicked in the Neeraj Vora-scripted Khiladi 420,you would further enjoy his glint-in-the-eye wantonness in Ajnabee (again scripted by Vora) . During a vacation in Mauritius, Vicky makes a leery suggestion to his buddy Raj: that they swap wives for a night. Akshay punctuates the indecent proposal with a swish-of-the-hand gesture, like two hurling trains crossing each other in the night.
And you think to yourself, the process of commodifying women that feminists have forbidden from the visual arts, hasn’t gone anywhere. Akshay brings quite a zing to the bang. In the swankily choreographed Anu Malik numbers like ‘Kasam se teri aankhein’ and ‘Tu sirf mera mehboob’, he’s more like a mischievous boy let loose in a toy store than a dangerous schemer .
Abbas-Mustan ought to have concentrated their considerable creative energies on building an inner tension among the friendly foursome rather than going into sleazy bylanes of the plot where escape routes get irreversibly jammed—at times quite literally so.In a ludicrously low-calorie sequence, a carrot-chewing Priya and her fugitive husband bypass a snowcapped Swiss police checkpost as though it was a police chowki in a Punjab village.
Throughout the film the Swiss cops are shown to be incompetent. They’re even referred to as ‘ullu ka pattha’ by comic sidekick Johnny Lever. But the Swiss tourism authorities needn’t take umbrage. Lever not only insults the Swiss but also Bengalis whom he brazenly parodies throughout the film.
Abbas and Mustan who earlier made clever and slick Hollywood adaptations, are here on slippery ground. Having caught on to a relatively bold (though dated) concept like wife swapping from a Hollywood thriller (Abbas-Mustan’s previous work Chori Chori Chupke Chupke was based on an outdated sexual concept like surrogate motherhood) the duo goes into chilling convulsions to rectify the impending moral upheavals in the plot through suspenseful antidotes.
Tragically two wrongs don’t make a right. They certainly don’t in this case. The cat-and-mouse game where the conniving Vicky sets up his neighbours in an elaborate sexual snare is so uninvolving , after a point viewers stop caring about these misguided fun-loving young characters.
Bobby Deol has the maximum footage in the proceedings. As the innocent abroad hoodwinked by a charlatan and a broad, he just about passes muster. Kareena Kapoor again struggles in an underwitten and unconvincing part after Yaadein. Though at times (for example in the totally redundant song ‘Jab tumhein aashiqui maloom hogi’) she offers us flashes of her classic elegance, unforgivably and inexcusably, Ajnabee doesn’t allow Kareena the room to blossom. The intended spark is missing from the film, and Kareena’s performance is the prime casualty.
Newcomer Bipasha Basu has an interesting though inconsistent part. Part-moll, part seductress she tries too hard to ooze oomph. Her Michelle Pfeiffer–styled introduction on a piano had audiences amused rather than titillated.
The few scattered incidental characters are so cadaverous, they prove to be the film’s death stamps. Finally, it’s Akshay Kumar’s lean, mean and pleasurable wickedness that brings a sparkle to this dead and illogical thriller where a fugitive of the law chases his wife all over a Swiss village singing loudly to win her over.
“When I get drunk I lose control,” confesses Bobby. So now you know why Abbas-Mustan lost control this time.
“Everything Is Planned,” the Akshay character plots boastfully. Except the film’s plot? After viewing the film you wonder why Abbas-Mustan chose to make a four-character musical chairs where even the zingy music can’t keep audiences in their chairs.
