Bombay to Bangkok Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Lena Christensen, Vijay Maurya, Manmeet Singh, Naseerudin Shah DIRECTOR: Nagesh Kukunoor If your plot is completely cuckoo, then your treatment has to be spot on. Nagesh Kukunoor setting a fast-talking Mumbai ka chhora loose upon Bangkok massage parlours, and unsuspecting Thai damsels, should have resulted in unbridled merriment. But Bombay To Bangkok’s is a drag, offering little drama or excitement. Shankar (Shreyas) nicks a bag full of cash from ‘Mumbai’s most fearsome don’ Khan Seth (Naseer), and finds himself flying out to Thailand in a fake white coat, with a bunch of thugs hotfooting after him. Soon, he is to be found peering at wrinkly nether regions of dirty old men (don't ask), dispensing Viagra to whoops of joy from the selfsame individuals (please don't) and cooking up a steaming batch of desi khana (he's not a doc, he's a cook, see?). This is when he is not searching for his precious loot, and losing his heart to the lovely Jasmine (Lena), and trying to keep his head above the meandering script. Kukonoor's keen eye for drollery, his true strength, seems to have gone missing. There are enough oddballs in the movie to keep the laughs coming. An overweight, jolly Sardar (Manmeet Singh), translator of Shankar's love-lorn ramblings, a suspicious salwaar-kameez clad psychiatrist who suspects Shankar is not who he is (we could have told you that, missy), and a Mumbai bhai with a rapper's soul (Vijay Maurya ), complete with the rings, gold chains, and the body piercings, and a troubled childhood. But the parts don't add up to the whole. Maurya is a hoot, making you wish there was more of him. Naseer comes on as if he'd rather be anywhere else, even in his one scene, where he looks nothing like a menacing don. What, this is quid pro for Iqbal? The eminently watchable Shreyas needed more able support: he's all over the place, making you wish there was less of him. The Thai debutant swings nicely between her lady of the night, and medical volunteer by day role, but is done in by the director's insistence on playing out the tag-line — ‘we are same same but different’. So is the movie. Shubhra Gupta shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com
