Jai Ho: My first film review

The other night, I accompanied my coworker Sapana to this week’s big box office debut, Jai Ho, starring Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan. I’ve endured several Hindi films with Sapana, to varied outcomes. Usually, I can’t understand anything being said, and since there are no subtitles in the theatre, I’m just along for the visuals. Which, in one way or another, rarely disappoint. (See photo below). 

Ram Lila 's Ranveer Singh: Yummy!

In spite of the language barrier, Jai Ho was particularly savory, exclusively for reasons outlined below.  

Don't read any more before you watch the trailer!

A movie buff myself, I can say that I am shamelessly ethnocentric about the primacy of western cinema. For me, a movie should not be easy-to-swallow entertainment, but a piece of humanity—not always neatly packaged between two rolls of credits. But Jai Ho is not a film; it’s a moving mass of memes, muscles, mindlessness, and motorcycles. It’s a cartoon. Actually, I take that back. I wouldn’t insult Seth McFarland, Mary Poppins, and all the imaginary friends of my childhood like that. The Fantasia Broomstick is far more dynamic actor than our hero, Jai. Plus, in a cartoon, you can’t reasonably criticize the lack of character development or its total disjunction from reality. But when the hero’s mother is plowed by an ice-cream truck and the only “serious complication” (the doctor reports gravely) is a bum kidney, you quickly swivel your head around the theatre to confirm you’re watching this movie with other grown-ups.

It got nuttier. In fact, every time I’d made up my mind to leave, the plot would toss some bizarre scene out of left field, and I've never been able to turn my back on absurdity. The plot line popcorned around from a girl with no arms attempting to use her teeth to complete an exam, to an apparent villain wetting his pants in terror, to an anachronistic flashback of trench warfare featuring what I believe to be a Tarantino cameo (apropos, I believe, for a film this self-indulgently horrible), to baleful ballads of love. 

In keeping with the Bollywood standard, the movie included the staple “romance” song, in which an entire courtship occurs within three minutes of jarringly unprofessional voice-overs. Here, the initial stuttering, self-conscious chapters of a romance are summarily reduced to hero and heroine playing “tag” in an orchard, the soft chiffon of her jasmine-scented sari tantalizingly out of his grasp as she coyly dashes behind a tree. The fact that a relationship can blossom despite such cheesy lyrics and old hat gender stereotypes is only fully realized at the conclusion of the song, when the heroine proudly displays the consummate stamp of her wincingly eternal devotion—Jai, in cursive, tattooed above her heart.  

Khan, as our hero Jai, is a cinematic monolith, both in his boorish delivery and his steroid-wittled physique. Endowed with such talents, he is perfectly poised for some splendidly dreadful fight scenes. The movie’s apparent moral (I was later informed) is to help others before oneself; but, as a viewer, I’m concerned this message was lost somewhere within the ubiquitous scenes of a fair-complected Jai dispatching hordes of faceless, dark-skinned underlings with nothing but his fountain pen—a regrettably tasteless, if unintentional, allegory for the current state of South Asian affairs.

The movie climaxes in a fist-fight to the death; the producers left no viewer hungry for another helping Salman Khan. After being shot and stabbed in vital places by a random evil-doer, Jai rips his blood-stained shirt with a growl of unadulterated rage, making his intention clear. He is going to f*** this unidentified villain up. The villain, not to be outdone, also tears his own shirt open and for the next 30 seconds, the camera cuts back and forth between gratuitous shirt ripping and well-oiled pectorals. Our villain is finally dispatched when Jai takes a bite out of his jugular.  

This movie was so brazenly bad that even Nicholas Cage and Kristen Stewart would have known better. So there it is, folks. A recap of perhaps the worst (or best, it’s a matter of perspective) Bollywood movie to ever hit and flop off the silver screen.