Bombay To Bangkok Hindi Movie

Jan 18, 2008 By Jahan Bakshi

Nagesh Kukunoor's latest film is a sore disappointment.

A film critic's predicament is definitely one that deserves sympathy. So, now I have to express in a decently articulate and detailed fashion what can be summed up in two words- skip it. Nagesh Kukunoor's latest film Bombay to Bangkok leaves me with nothing, and I mean nothing to write about.

All right, let me try. Shall I talk about the unusually inane premise that rests uncomfortably on the shoulders of a director who is clearly ill at ease in what can for lack of a better term, be called the 'mainstream masala' format? Okay, so the story is about Shankar Singh (Shreyas Talpade), an underworld don's (Naseeruddin Shah, in a wholly pointless appearance) cook who gets tempted to steal some money one day and runs away. As the don sends his wannabe gangsta-rapper son (an awful Vijay Maurya) after him, Shankar meanwhile flees to Bangkok (where else?) in the guise of a doctor and subsequently falls in love with a Thai massage girl (Lena Christensen) and…well, enough.

Bombay to Bangkok indeed marks a huge fall in quality from Kukunoor's earlier works, and his fans are surely bound to be sorely disappointed. The film ranges from being barely watchable to being unbearably trite and farcical. What makes it worse is the absence of even a single redeeming moment in the whole length of the film- one that makes us chuckle or even smile. Instead we are served some stupid references to Kukunoor and Ghai's old films, lame slapstick humor plus some grotesque sights including a close-up of Vijay Maurya's hairy belly button pierced with a ring.

In fact, Bombay to Bangkok is best described as a whydunit, since that is precisely the question that fails me totally- why on earth did Kukunoor do it? The shabby, almost non-existent script seems to be directed on autopilot by him, putting the entire load on Shreyas Talpade (as hapless as the audience) to carry the film. Talpade's innate earnestness can't carry the film; neither can the locales of Thailand, listlessly captured on celluloid by Sudeep Chatterjee. It doesn't help that the endlessly vacillating plot gives little time to the potentially cute romance between Talpade and Christensen, who share little chemistry.

But finally- sheer corniness aside, you've got to hand it over to the film's tagline- which proclaims it to be 'same same, but different'. Bombay to Bangkok is definitely different from what expect from Kukunoor- just not in a very nice way.