Thugs of Hindostan – I Went … I Spent … I Slept.

There are various different kinds of movies made under the generic heading of Cinema. They are classified under two main categories, Types & Adjectives.
Commercial Cinema, Art Cinema, Short Films, Talkies, Silent Movies…then within the same category one does find small cinema like a Badhai Ho , or a big budgeted cinema like Bahubali. The Adjectives spread between Blockbuster, Hit, Flop, Dud, Good and Bad and many others.

The same movie house YRF –Yash Raj Films, that gave commercial hits, romances and musicals of a high calibre and even some sterling small movies like Band Bajaa Baraat has created an absolutely new concept of a movie called “The Multi-Crore Inane Opus”. 


Thugs Of Hindostan is the pioneer and breaks new ground by launching an entire new sub-category of movies by itself.

So what do they do ? There is this dude called Vijay Krishna Acharya who had just missed reaching this milestone with his earlier film for YRF called Dhoom3. He goes and sits in a room with Aditya Chopra and they ideate. Acharya says Aamir gave us one of the biggest hits with Dhoom3 and he is the one I want. Adi Chopra says check. Aamir is in. There was a time when this Khan , the most visibly cerebral among the three Khans of Hindi Cinema actually would try and get into a character and do a lot of homework on it. Today he has reverted to the veteran genre of acting which is the Pran style of performing.  Here one creates a look, assumes a mannerism for the character and then hams away until eternity. Aamir has decided that he likes Captain Jack Sparrow and his look in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, now no one told him that his character is almost entirely a land lubber and barely on sea, but no Aamir liked the outlandish style of Johnny Depp which looks utterly charming and suits Depp but on Aamir it looks forced, sluggish and silly. 

Then Adi said I want to beat my Dads record of casting coups. His movie Silsila had made a lot of noise purely on the basis of the casting of Bachchan , Rekha and Jaya Bhadhuri. I want to top that. Aamir is the only Khan to never have shared screen  space with the big B so …check Big B is also in. Suddenly almost 50 crores have been budgeted with these two names in. So who next ? Aamir with the idiotic character cannot have a love interest but we do need a a seriously good looking woman who can look divine as she wriggles about. Acharya raises his hand and says like in Dhoom3, I am comfortable with Katrina. 5-10 more crores have been instantly earmarked. We need ships, forts, cannons, armies, pirates, foreigners and how the heck are we going to make a story out of this?

Then the director laughs at the naiveté of his producer and tells him, you are too old fashioned. Stories and plots are overrated, who needs them? We can looking at the mood of the country try and inject some amount of Nationalism, ekhaad tadka , Nationalism and patriotism sells and then the lead characters can do every single type of nonsense and it shall be swallowed. When we turn a criminal into a revolutionary and patriot anything goes. So we have something like this happening onscreen, unmelodious totally un-hummable songs, forgotten the moment the song has finished, Katrina sings and dances, Aamir Dances and Sings, Bachhan looks suitably intense and the angry young man that made him the Big B having gone, he is now an angry old man who looks rather unsure rapeling down a rope or riding a horse and doing serious sword fighting. Some of the wrinkles under his chin wobble these days.

All in all this is what happened. I find my seat, sink into it and before long Ronit Roy of the Perry Masonish, Adalat fame from TV comes bizarrely garmented as a Maharja who is shown owning a fort for exactly 13 minutes after which he is killed and his daughter is taken n brought up by Khudabash aka Bachchan…and once Aamir hits the screen, sense leaves. My eyelids had become heavy and they dropped. The six word honest review of this movie would therefore be. I Went … I Spent … I Slept. 

My final bit of a suggestion is that if you cannot avoid going for this movie is to choose a cinema hall with the most comfortable seats.