She delivers a Bachchan line with elan, and is particularly awesome in a scene where - in a nod to the southern horror cliche - she’s casually possessed by a ghost. She’s visibly having a blast and her glee is infectious. I’d comment on her comic timing if this film had any well-written gags, but by herself (and especially in comparison to her hero here) Padukone is a delight. So confident is she that even her outlandish accent seems normal after a bit, and she commits to the role most enthusiastically. Padukone, as said, pulls off her bit with panache. (But alas, we underestimate the power of a common Khan.) Even with a few too many airborne jeeps, this could have been a daftly enjoyable lark. There, see? Simple, fun and the ensuing hijinks pretty much write themselves. She’s being kidnapped, he tries to speak up, and they’re both frogmarched down to her village where her gangster father is told that our hero is her daughter’s suitor. He gets on to a train to throw his sweet, unsuspecting grandmother off his scent, and it is here he runs into Padukone’s Meena, a pretty girl with an accent thicker than Mehmood. In sum: Rahul, entrusted with his grandfather’s ashes to be immersed down south, decides instead to hotfoot it to Goa and party with friends who have “arranged” NRI girls. It’s a shame because Chennai Express is built on a simple enough bit of fluff, something that would truly have sparkled brightly in the hands of, say, an Imtiaz Ali, but something that would itself have been inherently more entertaining had Khan not been intent on looking an imbecile. Khan yelps and squeaks and shrieks and bares fangs and pouts and, well, exhausts himself overcompensating at every step, despite nobody else in the film following this template so inanely animated it’d make Jim Carrey think twice.
He performs in an inexplicably bizarre pitch, as if the filmmakers (and himself, the producer) decided that he should play it like a rejected 40s cartoon, like Daffy Duck gone awry. Khan’s Rahul plays the freak while the locals around him look at him dazed, befuddled by his buffoonery.Īll the other actors in this enterprise, despite their one-note roles, conform to the universe of this film, to its reality, but Khan’s having nothing of it.
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This is, in many ways, a full-throated tribute, a Sun TV Strikes Back statement of a film, where a typically cliched example of Southern style masala chugs along normally (and unironically) but is disrupted by a Bollywood actor who has no business there.
Rohit Shetty’s Chennai Express is a curious beast, a film it seemed would lampoon the South Indian blockbuster - those films we claim are cheesier and sillier than our own (and then remake with much fanfare) - but happens to be, in fact, the diametric opposite.
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At the time, her acting inabilities were cannily masked by the director giving her little to do except look staggering, and by Khan himself, carrying the film on the muscles of his tremendous charisma.Ĭhennai Express is, in a way, full circle for that very lady as she - enervated by box-office success and increasingly self-aware as an actress - holds up her end of the film far better, and more consistently than her leading man. Six years ago, Deepika Padukone made a celebrated debut opposite Shah Rukh Khan in a rollicking entertainer Om Shanti Om, that marvellously spoofed his stardom.
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