Joker Movie Review

[bollywood]

Owing to the technical challenges, the concept of weaving a story along aliens and UFOs has always been tricky for Indian filmmakers, but I would like to applaud Shirish Kunder just for the fact that he dared to make a film around extra-terrestrials, even though the success of the venture looks very bleak.

‘Joker’ upped the curiosity level of Indian audience, especially after Bollywood’s exciting and a rather successful brush with ‘Jaadu’ – the most adorable alien we all met in Rakesh Roshan’s ‘Koi Mil Gaya’. But, Kunder’s much ambitious project- ‘Joker’ clearly lacks the ‘wow’ factor which it abundantly promised in the film’s trailer. Entertainment wise, the film really has nothing to offer.

The single star that the film gets is for the fact that Joker is probably the first mainstream comic fantasy made in Mumbai. That apart, it has nothing that remotely resembles a redeeming routine. Pity, even Chitrangada Singh’s Kaafirana dil can make no dent.

What Joker delivers in the garbled guise of the genre plumbs such depths of vapidity that it stands no chance of ever coming up for air.

The run time of the film is an hour and forty-five minutes. Thank God for small mercies. But even at that length, Joker is difficult to deal with.

The story is very run-of the-mill. Akshay (Augustya), a NASA scientist returns to India to improve the condition of his village named ‘Paglapur’, apparently which has lost its identity from the face of the earth. Now since the administrators have no clue as to under whose jurisdiction Paglapur exist, Augustya’s village is devoid of any basic amenities like bijli and paani leading to the inhabitants going eccentric who incidentally happen to be former fugitives of a mental asylum. To improve the situation, Augustya with the help of the villagers hatches an absurd plan to attract media and the administration’s attention, but somehow the scheme doesn’t work out eventually leading to utter chaos.

Akshay Kumar is as good as he can be – and that isn’t all that good. Sonakshi sleepwalks through the film, grinning and frowning as he drowns in the morass,

Give Joker a miss if you value your sanity and money. It gives commercial Hindi cinema a bad name.