Joker: A mad mad mad world out there

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Minissha Lamba, Shreyas Talpade
Rated: 6.5/10
Akki may have opted out of the promotions of his latest film Joker, but the mad mad mad mount — part satire, part humour, part Lagaan, part Krrish — confuses you enough to wonder whether you should get insane enough to love it or you should sit on your intellectual high horse and be a spoiler.
Either ways, none in Paglapur gaon would care a d**n. Beeping on the Indian map as a village in no-man’s land between three States, it has been living a life so crazy that even the biggest madhouse of yore it houses in its confines would wonder if brains are returning to their skulls. Akshay, a paranormal scientist on a NASA project to catch alien sounds on his innovative machine, flowers more like the Aamir Khan of Lagaan in his dhoti-safa outlook after his squint-eyed father fakes a terminal illness to get him back from America.
That is all it takes for you to start questioning yourself for lack of any grey matter and wondering why you are sinking, and sinking happily, into the quicksand of completely off-the-top and senseless dose of humour wrapped in the most crazy dialogues and absurd situations.
I mean, there is a child hanging upside down believing he is a lantern; there is a white man running around the village speaking in theth Hindi; there is a brother who speaks a language which eventually only aliens understand. There is a king more Roman than Indian, a teacher who lives in the World War II era and runs for cover everytime a plane passes by. And then, there is a host of others with quite unsubtle eccentricities. Yet, this madhouse put together is actually an endearingly simple population untouched by human chicanery of any kind.
Joker is a film that compels you to get involved, laugh out aloud, enjoy insanity as never before and serenade a brand of ridiculousness that seldom visits even Bollywood.
In that, you could applaud writer-director Shirish Kunder’s effort and Akki is the man to give meaning to such, well, insane madness of epic proportions.
Indeed, the arrangement with derangement is, to say the least, absurdly delightful.
Source:  2 September, 2012, The Sunday Pioneer

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