Himace, tu mera hero!
Teraa Suroor
Director: Shawn Arranha
Actors: Himesh Reshammiya, Farah Karimaee
Rating: *
No, no, no, who cast Himesh Reshammiya as the hero again? Himesh, himself; of course. And this is the tenth time he’s done this to himself. What the audience has to go through as a result is merely collateral damage.
Now just look at what the leading man, a musician otherwise, has to endure. To start with, he’s probably starved himself on a protein shake diet. His jaw has sunken into a pothole, particularly under the eyes. The rest of the tiny face is covered in hair from the crop on top, and a thick stubble/beard.
He usually sits or stands alone, permanently motionless in brooding mode, wearing black aviators to hide himself from the camera even more. He walks with his back straight, mostly in slow motion, and on occasion does part his swollen lips to talk like R2D2 in mechanical, croaky voice.
It matters very little what happens in the rest of the movie thereafter. There is enough to observe about Himace Bhai, who’s got himself another firang type girlfriend he’s willing to give up his life for.
She doesn’t like him very much currently. I’m surprised. He had apparently cheated on her. Come on now, people. Blame the girls who just can’t resist him-ace. How is it his fault?
This was also the point of the supposed first part of this franchise film, called Aap Kaa Surroor—Himace bhai’s 2007 debut. I clearly remember people going quite nuts before that picture’s release.
The debutant hero and his baseball cap had become a running national joke by then. I’m sure a lot of people entered theatres to check Him out. The film, shot wholly in Germany, I’m told, was a huge hit.
Sarchasm is the gap between intended sarcasm and the one who doesn’t get it. But you can still sense the logic behind Himace bhai turning into a movie-star.
Most Bollywood movies are assumed to do well because of the music anyway. But the star on the screen who merely lip-syncs and dances (and is hardly great at that either) takes home the heroine and all the rewards.
This is Himace bhai’s tenth film as hero-musician, and 100th as music composer for T-Series. Why not walk away with all the fame, female attention, and the money, he would have wondered once, probably looking at Salman, the super-star, dancing to a Himesh track.
And so in sleeveless vest, showing off his Lokhandwala mooskals, Himesh goes off to Ireland in this film, to get back his Katrina Kaif like ladylove (Farah Karimaee), who’s been jailed and unfairly framed for carrying drugs.
The filmmakers rightly patch together a bunch of music videos—remix of the Kaante song ‘Ishq Samundar’, another one that sounds like the Aashiqui 2 track ‘Tum hi ho’ etc.—between chase and gun-shot sequences to keep us from falling apart. If nothing else, you observe the sort of money that must have gone into putting this pic together.
And a pop-trivia question pops into my head: Fill in the missing hero in the line-up of actors in this film—Shekhar Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Kabir Bedi, _____.
Yeah that’s the cast credit of this picture. There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there is Master Himesh: my inspiration; true, my hero!
Mayank Shekhar’s book NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING, on desis and pop-culture, is available online and at leading bookstores