Khatta Meetha
Starring: Akshay Kumar, Trisha, Makrand Deshpande, Rajpal Yadav, Neeraj Vora.
Direction: Priyadarshan
Music: Pritam Chakraborty, Shani
Production: Hari Om Entertainment Co, Shree Ashtavinayak Cinevision Ltd
The ever eventful director of Bollywood, Priyadarshan, does it one more time by releasing another film that stars none other than Akshay Kumar and Trisha as the lead casts of Khatta Meetha. It is a fact that Priyadarshan’s craft is dwelled much into remaking Malayalam but this time he got carried away with it. Comedy remakes is not a problem at all but political spoof such as “Vellanakaludae Nadu” definitely fell short of pleasing audiences because of its lack of comedy genre and sided more on its political aspect and purely masala.
The film begins with the protagonist Sachin Tichkule (Akshay Kumar) who is a Gandhian law student that became a dishonest road construction contractor who needs to look for his way back to his ‘sathyamaeva jayathae’ path which is spoiled by his fraudulent brother and brother-in-laws and their friend who happens to be a deceitful politician who marries his sister later on. His ex-girlfriend back in college, Gehna (Trisha) comes back as a Municipal Commissioner to be startled that his once goody boyfriend turns into a dishonest road contractor. The question now is will Sachin be done by the end of the film? The audience will surely have to look forward to the result of this question.
After the astounding Kanchivaram, Priyadarshan significantly made Billu, De Dana Dan and Bum Bum Bole a hit and now he comes across with Khatta Meetha. There is definitely a short of stability, the emotions of the actors were exaggerated in not a good way, the comedy genre was there, there was a lack in the romance aspect and there are just one too many conflicts and the film’s pace slow that the climax turned out not that exciting.
In terms of the acting skills of Akshay Kumar, there is no doubt that he knows his craft real well. It clearly showed that what his role required was there but internalizing it was not much what he did. The unveiling of Trisha Krishnan in Bollywood was not that appealing because of her lack of certainty to carry out the role of a municipal commissioner and her dubbing of the dialogue was not simultaneous. It was tragic to see that the southern actress looked not so genuine. In the part of Manoj Joshi and Rajpal Yadav, they were convincing in their roles and were really entertaining. Although Urvashi Sharma had not much to do in the film, her small role completed the film. No one else in the film was more wasted than Aruna Irani and Tinu Anand while Makrand Deshpande gave justice to his role.
There was no need to make try-outs in the cinematography of the movie and the skills of Manikandan showed in the chase sequence prior to the climax which came out pretty good. The art done by Sabu Cyril was outstanding for it was hard to tell which was real from fake and things like this are only attained by the best. The editing skills of Arun Kumar was done with lenience. Pritam’s music was okay along with Aila re Aila and Sajde which are well-known but its positioning in the narration of the film took the gleam out of the tunes. On the whole, the film was a downer.