I caught ‘Welcome to Karachi’ over the weekend past, since I feel Arshad hasn’t really been able to land a good role that will exploit his full potential. Felt this movie had the scope, another matter all together that it failed to live up to it. Caught it at the Inorbit Mall – PVR. Ticket pricing was fair.
The movie’s basic premise is of how a US visa obsessed Gujju youth and his best friend consider the sea route to the US after his visa application gets rejected for a third time. Jacky Bhagnani is the aforesaid Gujju(Kedar Patel) and Arshad is his best friend, an ex-Naval Captain(Shammi) who has been court martialled for a serious lapse. As I said before, the movie had a lot of potential with an actor of the calibre of Arshad and with the aid of a tight script, which unfortunately wasn’t the case.
The movie has them take a yacht into the high seas with the intention of reaching the shores of USA. Note: the planning is sketchy and they are shown as skipping a theme party booked on their yacht by Jacky’s father(Dalip Tahil in a guest appearance), meeting with squally weather and getting washed ashore some place. Local thieves have taken away all their valuables so they are without any money or ID in a strange land, which turns out to be Karachi. In the next moment, the thief gets blown up in terror strike and the local intelligence officers find Arshad & Jacky’s wallets in the debris and assume the worst – it being a strike plotted by the Indian services since the wallet had Arshad’s photo in naval uniform.
From there on, it turns out to be a poor Comedy of Errors kind of film with silly plot jumps like the scene where they change into local clothes while exiting the hospital and incidentally, Arshad has the clothes of a medic while Jacky wears the sherwani of a groom. En route, Arshad is kidnapped by gun wielding goons and it turns out that they thought he was a medic so took him along to deliver a baby for their don’s wife.
While in ‘3 Idiots’ the delivery scene did show the use of a vacuum cleaner, here it’s a ridiculous scene, which is not at all funny.
The Pak Intelligence office is Lauren Gottleib(suitably scarfed to look local). She has precious little to do in the film rather than look pretty and give that goofy/toothy grin, aside from flashing her tight abs in itsy bitsy clothing in two item numbers.
While Jacky seems earnest enough and has the right Gujju accent, I really don’t think any other producer would give him his next film. Arshad is on a roll, but there is little he can do when there is no script worth the mention.
Some good scenes:
The characters intro
The yacht pulling away from the jetty soon as the wedding party reaches
The detonator scene
The scene with the unmanned drone
Watching the cricket match on a community TV in the Pathan stronghold
The scene where they are ‘prepared’ to face the media and introduced as serving officers in the Pak army
The scene where they strike a deal with the CIA chief
Not so good:
Stale puns on ‘Faqr’(feel proud of) and the phonetically similar sounding English profanity.
CIA chief shown as a bumbling idiot
The CIA operative with a conscience(?!?)
The scene where guards of every nationality fire away indiscriminately
The ending is rather abrupt but the closing credits song is a chart buster all right ‘Lalla lalla lori, daru ki katori…’
No wonder Irffan Khan had second thoughts and quit the film.
The culprit was the weak script. It dithered between being a desi version of “Dumb & Dumber’ and ‘Baby’ and fell between two stools. If it had remained focused on any one, would have been entertaining all right.
The media reviews gave it 2 which I feel is adequate. While it was not half as bad a ‘Roy’, if you have better things to do, go do it rather watch this movie. You wouldn’t have missed anything at all.
Rate it 2.25(extra 0.25 for Arshad as I really like his comic timing)