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Badmaash Company

Badmaash Company (2010)

What do the box office results say about the Indian audience? When movies such as Badmaash Company fare well at the box office, and attract large audiences, what can one conclude about their taste in films?

Don’t get me wrong, the trailers were good enough to attract anyone easily: foreign location, beautiful babe, friends having a good time – that’s an easy enough formula to adhere to if the filmmakers want the movie to be watched by a lot of people.

Therefore the box office doesn’t really represent how good or bad the movie actually is; it only represents the amount of people that actually make their way to the cinemas to watch it.

That can be the only logical explanation, as one cannot understand why Badmaash Company would do so well otherwise. The movie opened to a good start, and earned fairly well. However the movie itself was not worth all the brouhaha.

The movie is about four friends who want to make it big. Well, honestly, it’s about one person who wants to make it big and gets help from his three friends. Therefore they con their way into success, where they’re living the high life. Eventually, karma hits them, and they fall with the same speed and impact, as when they were soaring high. Added with a bunch of songs shot in clubs and on the beach, some sizzling scenes between the two leads and the typical good-always-triumphs-over-bad ending, you have Badmaash Company in a nutshell.

However, the elements that were supposed to work for the movie are the reason why the movie failed. The plot could have worked, had everything else not been so forcefully added to the plate.

For instance, the unnecessary vulgarity, the crude dialogues, the lavish spending sprees – all seemed really fake and unnatural. They show Shahid as the mastermind behind all their cons, and the one determined to make it big one day and he aids the gang to their riches. But the irritating part was that after every con they pulled, they would show a scene (or a song) where they all would spend all their money on clothes and gambling and other useless things, and it all seemed so forced. Bollywood movies need to stop doing the overly glamourous thing when it isn’t looking right.

The second element which failed was the spice that was being forcefully making its way through onto the screen with the help of Anushka Sharma: the lady is fierce and strong, is an aspiring model, barely wears any clothes – basically everything that makes a woman sexy. Even then, her dialogues most of the times seemed trashy and totally unnecessary.

The second half of the movie sees a dramatic change in Shahid, when he takes the entire posse to Manhattan, and becomes so arrogant and conceited that he calls himself god at one point. What exactly was that about? He is a man with morals in the start, and after 60 minutes, we see him calling himself god, where the rest of the gang actually starts clapping and hooting afterwards!

The ending was based on a ridiculous scheme they come up with, which is absolutely honest, but clever. Therefore, he attempts to make up for all the wrong he has done by doing good. The earlier cons were actually believable, but the last final scheme which was supposed to be the biggest plan did not even make sense. So are they saying that big corporations in America are that stupid that they actually fell for the idiocy?

The most amusing part is that the movie was supposed to be a comedy, but there wasn’t a single joke that could have made anyone even smile if nothing else.

The magic of Yash Raj Films seems to be fading, as it continues to produce one failed production after another. Unfortunately, you can’t even watch these movies with your families anymore. Badmaash Company (if it absolutely must be watched out of curiosity) must not be viewed with children or young adults, or even parents for that matter. Otherwise be prepared to face some embarrassment, and quicken your reflexes to be able to quickly grab the remote control, and forward the scenes before harming anyone’s childhood – Manal Faheem Khan

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 2010, Genre – Comedy, Country – India, Language – Hindi, Producer – Aditya Chopra, Director – Parmeet Sethi, Music Director – Pritam Chakraborty, Cast - Shahid Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Meiyang Chang, Vir Das, Anupam Kher, Kiran Juneja, Pawan Malhotra, Jameel Khan

Comedy