I know I signed off back in July, and this whole crazy tale should be over, but I feel compelled to tie up one loose end. Sit down for two minutes. We need to talk about Ra.One.
Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, and because I really know how to show a girl a good time, I took her to the Vue cinema next to Oxford United’s ground to watch my Bollywood film - in 3D, which offered the tantalising prospect of seeing my background role as Barman 2 even more vividly. We had the entire auditorium to ourselves, which made it extra special, and glossing over the fact that it was 2 for 1 Orange Wednesday, I think you’ll agree that I do indeed go the extra mile to make my wife’s life complete. As birthday treats go, it promised to be a huge triumph. Unlike the film.
Oh dear. It is awful. Apart from one rather glittering nightclub scene, in which the bar staff look particularly jaunty, Ra.One is a pungent pile of Stinking Bishop. Its calamitous failing is its woeful script, closely followed by the most tortuous, buttock-clenching acting since Gary Barlow dabbled with a career-change and played a postman on Heartbeat. It’s horribly flabby, taking ten minutes to spoon-feed the beleaguered viewer each thirty-second piece of information. So obese is it, in fact, that I must confess that this writer’s opinion is only based on fifty percent of the film. Ra.Half. Like all Indian movies, it paused for an intermission. That was after we’d suffered an hour and twenty minutes, and we decided that the further hour and twenty still to run were probably better spent doing … well, anything. My tax return was suddenly inviting.
The film’s plot is that a geeky games-designer dad designs a video game for his son, featuring a mega-baddie (Ra.One) because his son loves villains. The hero in the game (G.One) is modelled on the geek dad, so Khan plays both parts – a handy curly-hair wig alerting us to when he’s the real-world nerd. Due to some never-fully-explained hocus pocus with ‘beams of information’, the baddie breaks out of the game and tries to kill Khan’s son in the real world: cue lots of Terminator 2 shape-shifting and Matrix-style running and jumping in long black coats.
Worse than its infuriatingly lethargic pace, however, is how horribly wide-of-the-mark it aims its humour at a western audience. Now, before you leap to the defence of Shah Rukh Khan and his merry band of dream-weavers, exclaiming that ‘Bollywood is different’ and ‘you can’t compare the Indian market with that of the west’, just remember this: Ra.One was specifically made in an attempt to ‘take on Hollywood’. It was billed as ‘Bollywood’s break-out movie’ and has the price-tag to prove it. How, then, can David Benullo, Kanika Dhillon and ‘King’ Khan himself sleep at night taking the credit for penning such a palette of poo? There really isn’t a moment of dialogue (in the first half) that doesn’t have you clenching your teeth in horror, wincing, “Oh God, make it stop.”
Highlights of this master class in ‘script writing as a form of torture’ are almost all in the films (ahem) ‘comedy’ vignettes. The most jaw-slackening of these is the running racist joke about Chinese people. The first time we meet tech-head Akaashi, played by Tom Wu, he is throwing an office colleague to the floor. Shah Rukh comments, “Did someone call him Jackie Chan again?”
Akaashi screams back, “Not all Chinese men are Jackie Chan!” to the immense mirth of his office colleagues. This Jackie Chan ‘joke’ just won’t go away, cropping up at least another three times. Earlier, in the film’s opening (immensely tedious) dream sequence, Khan’s heroic alter-ego beats up three Chinese girls referred to as ‘friends of Bruce Lee’, and as he confronts the final villain, he manages to crowbar in a line about food – “Don’t offer me Chinese, I’ve just eaten some.” – which, apart from being wholly inappropriate and not actually making sense, commits the even greater sin: it’s not funny.
Later, the all-powerful super-villain, Ra.One, kills poor Akaashi’s aged mother, delivering the line, “I hate Chinese.” It went from being a bad joke, to feeling like some sort of hostile campaign. Have I missed something? What did China do to India, to justify this battering on such a high profile pedestal?
It’s Khan’s life-sapping attempts at humour that will do more damage to Bollywood’s reputation than they could imagine. While the film’s special effects are impressive, and the overall ‘look’ of the movie is on a par with Hollywood offerings, there is simply no excuse for Shah Rukh Khan playing Mister Bean. Visual gags that Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis would have deemed too poor to line a litter tray, get the big-screen, agonising Khan treatment here. Reversing a car to knock another car (which inexplicably has no handbrake on) into another car – hilarious. ‘A’ plus. Throwing some keys to a friend, but seeing them drop into the cleavage of a buxom girl who, for some reason, doesn’t notice and thinks he’s a pervert for looking at her chest – side-splitting. Solid gold.
And don’t even get me started on how many times they make a hilarious joke about Khan hurting his groin. Well, OK, it was three. But that was just in the first half. Why no one, in the high-stakes world that Khan inhabits, thought it might be a good idea to consult a writer or producer with some Hollywood or Brit-flick clout about this script is a mystery. Especially when they were making such a song and dance (no Bollywood pun intended) about Ra.One being marketed ‘to the west’. Any one of us, you, me, next door’s dog, could have read that script and the wind-erosion of our teeth would have been enough to alert them to some essential re-writes.
Having said all that, I will be buying the DVD.
Well, come on, I’m in it! There is a fleeting glimpse of what both Jill and I thought was me, doing my barman bit in the opening ten seconds of the ‘video game launch party’ scene. Admittedly, we couldn’t be sure, and as the entire dance spectacular took six days to shoot, I knew after those opening seconds that we were already looking at footage from long after I’d got the bus home (with my stolen bhangra braces). It’s a good scene, though. I’m happy with it. It turns out Shah Rukh is a dab hand at miming to a song while dancing in a line. It’s what Bollywood does best. And I feel genuinely dismayed that, after the rather good Guzaarish, which we saw in Jaipur, and also the critical acclaim received internationally for My Name Is Khan, Ra.One has taken Bollywood so many steps backwards. It’s surely not what they were hoping for, when a viewer comes away from a billion Rupee action movie thinking the best bit was the ‘miming to a song and dancing in a line’ scene. They’ve been doing that for sixty years.
Then again, I did only see the first half. The second half played to an empty cinema - a dark, soulless chasm, echoing to the abomination of cinema’s most catastrophic dialogue.
They should put that on the DVD cover.
The original account of my experience on the set of Ra.One is HERE
