As Anees Bazmee’s degrading, puerile farce Thank You grinds into its second-hour, it occurs that the main problem with the film (and it has many) is that the writer/director just really hates his characters. Every man is a sleazy, sex-obsessed liar; every woman is a pandering, stupid and/or vengeful shrew. To consider the opposing view – that Bazmee actually relates to and sympathises with this shallow, sexist world – is too depressing to contemplate.
Following his ensemble’s smutty, back-stabbing shenanigans is a chore which begs the question: Where exactly did Bazmee expect his audience to find the laughs in this repellent concoction?
Bazmee, who has mined this dirty-minded comedy genre since the box office success of the similarly lowbrow No Entry (2005), wastes no time setting the tone for his film. We meet 40-something Raj (Bobby Deol) as he engages in a mock fight with his stunning 20-something wife, Simran (Sonam Kapoor), during which he ad-libs about wild sex with a former flame. In the very next scene, audiences learn the ad-lib was not all talk – Raj and his repugnant friends Yogi (Suniel Shetty) and Vikram (Irfan Khan) smirk over CCTV footage of him bedding a prospective client.
It’s an awful scene, entirely free of irony or self-awareness, as the members of the trio celebrate their conquests on the white-leather sofas of their enormous yachts. It emerges that the other wives, Maya (Celina Jaithley) and Shivani (Rimi Sen), know of their husband’s philandering but tolerate it in order to continue to enjoy the spoils of wealth. These are the types of people Bazmee asks his audience to relate to over 140 minutes.
Simran is the only character who takes a stand (but even so, Kapoor’s teary, shrill performance is far short of the strong moral compass that her role should have provided). She hires a flute-playing private eye, Kishen (Akshay Kumar, hammy as ever), to expose Raj’s indiscretions. This could all have been easily achieved in the first hour of the film when, following a lacklustre dance number, an inebriated dalliance from Raj’s past confronts him; the men rally to his aid by publically slandering the drunken woman and her claims in front of their wives"¦ who buy the whole moronic charade...
In a nutshell, that set-up encapsulates Thank You: cocky, bling-covered old jerks, with shallow stupid wives, who spend their days trying to score with busty model-types.
Post intermission, the story takes a dour, cheesy route that never convinces; gross sentimentality and unashamed smut are awkward bedfellows and Bazmee is not accomplished enough as a storyteller to make the two halves whole.
Shot in Toronto and Ontario, the film features the bright, bold colours expected from your standard Bollywood film, though what appears playful and delightful in better movies seems garish and gaudy here. Some stuntwork impresses (a beach-umbrella parachuting from a hotel’s penthouse is well-handled), but when the best thing about a romantic comedy is the stunt team’s contribution, you know that something isn’t right.
