Luck -- The review

It’s tough to dispute a movie which sticks to its promise so tenaciously.Luck is about luck and it will keep reminding you about that after every 15 seconds.

Sample this one exchange:

Sunjay Dutt (who, being Musa, is always accompanied by an Arabic sort of music whenever he makes an entry, which is all the time, or does something like whirl a pistol in his hands in silhouette): Maqsood ki taqdeer (luck) ko nazar lag gayi. Who kehte hain na: duniya saali jalti hai, jab taqdeer(luck) chalti hai. The only things sure about luck is that it will change. Luck saalaa ek hi cheez ki guarantee ke saath aataa hai – ki who saalaa kabhi bhi badal sakta hai. Kyun Major?

Mithun (Major): Na luck badalta hai, na insaan ki taqdeer (luck). Insaan ka waqt badalta hai, Musa!

Despite hailing from “Luck”now, I have never heard “Luck” so many times in my entire life as I did in these two hours.

Luck is about a Roadies type game where the girls do not fight and the contestants are, thankfully, allowed to die. It is impossible to review the movie by conventional measures – just like a triple rated adult movie would be. (Though I am reminded of a friend from college whose comment after one such movie was – “Story mein dam nahi tha.”) Acting, character development, and even thrills are all incidental. This movie is about luck – its different forms – and in how many corny manners it can be spoken of. It lifts its material from famous short stories, B-grade Hollywood flicks, and the cheesiest Bollywood fare.

In short, I enjoyed Luck. It’s like Ghaayal showing major yesterstars in a series of hospital beds, all ghaayal, exchanging dialogues about how they got there.

Sanjay – Major, meri yeh yalgaar thi ki main kabhi gaar-yal nahi hunga.

Mithun – Musa, insaan hosh mein tab aataa hai jab woh disco ki stage par ho aur Rajesh Khanna usse Gaa-yell kar raha ho.

Ravi Kissen (to Imraan) – Oye chikane, hee-hee-hee, tu banegaa meri paayal?

Imraan – Nahi. Tab tu karega mujhe peechhe se ghaayal.

Danny enters – Generator mein tel khatam ho raha hai. Tum sab logon ka life support chalaa jayega. Kisee ke paas ho–gaa aa-yal(oil)?

Yes. It’s something like that. If you think there is anything in Luck other than word-play around kismet, taqdeer and luck, do find it and let me know. Even the songs are about luck aazmaa-ing and choreographed with the actors cramped in giant letters of – take a guess – no – not that – what? Why the hell would.. anyway.. not that too – give up? LUCK.

Sanjay Dutt is the lucky man – which has nothing to do with the fact that he’s allegedly humped every moving thing of the feminine persuasion in Bollywood – who arranges lucky men to test their lucks against blank cartridges, non-functioning parachutes and sharks (Other than the Citifinancial ones most of them are trying to evade). He chooses Ram, via his hechman Danny – again this has nothing to do with his having exhausted with all the females and Imran with his luscious lips being the next best thing – for a game because he’s so lucky. So lucky that he was born in the house of Aamir Khan. In the movie though Imraan has one bad luck – his father – who dies after, as the policeman, tells doing what harshad did in 1992. this is the director’s way of showing that the story is as grounded in Indian reality as Sunju baba's helicopter landing in the middle of a Bombay Coffee Day; even Dhanbad is mentioned in passing. Ram’s mom is Rati Agnihotri and Ram does as many facial expressions as her prolific cousin, Atul Agnihotri, once did in Aatish, again with Sunju, and which has since inspired countless such no-brainers.

Mithun is an army major who never gets killed (Indian fauj's lucky mascot) though a rather incompetent one, always ending up getting his entire batallion massacred. Rupa Ganguly, who with every passing year reminds me more of Anju Mahendru, his wife refuses to die and he has to arrange some 20 lakhs for an operation, the details of which are never made clear to even Mithun. Mithun fishes out the calculator and makes the right choice of getting the money by risking his life – and luck. He figures that the cost of the kilometres of kafan needed to swaddle the erstwhile Draupadi would be much higher.

Ravi Kissen is a serial killer who is hanged for murdering some 11 girls but the knot of the rope of his noose slips – which again reminded me of the chain of a rickshaw in Lucknow which slipped at least a million times the day of my ICSE board making me an hour late. Unfortunately, I was never pardoned from that exam; but Ravi is because of a loophole in the law that no man can be hung twice (yes, it’s illegal to be twice hung – in case you were planning to get an extra implant). A distortion of “can’t be tried twice” but hey! This is Bollywood. And, to think of it, Indian law.

Now Ravi wants to loosen some other knots – those of the bikini of the debutant Shruti Hassan who passes muster (Her being Saar’s daughter – how can I say otherwise?!) and thankfully looks more like Sarika than Kamal. Otherwise it would have been really disturbing seeing Imraan woo her and Ravi try to rape her.

There is that Haryanvi girl from Chak De who does a good job in a role written as an afterthought. As part of her contract she has to speak about camel, since she rode camels (in a decent way) in Pakistan, every now and then and that’s understandable.

Then there are the extras, black white and yellow contestants, who never know they’re dead the moment they signed up for a luck-to-death game in a Hindi channel. I have heard that Tom Alter is livid he did not get an opportunity to recite some Urdu poems on taqdeer.

Did I miss anyone?

Yes, there was Mr Mukku Ambani doing a cameo (a cameo and not a camel – and no, Miss Haryana doesn’t ride him) as a South Indian don as the picture on the right shows. Nice try, Ambu! You thought you would escape unnoticed? Bad times, huh?

The one positive I got from the movie is that Danny and Mithun are signing up movies. Somebody please take these fine actors and give them the movie they deserve while they last.

Given that there was little to look in the movie other than the letter Luck (which, like Tyler, appeared in blinks throughout the movie), I still managed one astounding discoveries.

The Chosen. Nothing less.

For years I have despaired that Kishan Kumar never had a worth successor. Just like my grandmother hints at my marriage by asking me to show a pota before she ummm you know (It’s been a shock for me in the past couple of years in how many elderly relatives in my family have turned out to be salivating paedophiles), I know I can die peacefully now.

I had heard about Imran but this is the first time I am seeing him. Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me about his fantastic eyebrows? You can lose a wallet in them! Of course, the greatest of them still remains untouched as the snap below amply shows.

You don't have to be a big high-brow to join us -- just big eye-brows would do.