If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that life is a lot like Bollywood: the genre can change completely, right when you least expect it. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's a humanitarian disaster of global proportions, but change happens. And that's what New Year's Eve is really all about; whatever calendar you use, it's good to take one night a year to decide what genre you really want to live in. And that brings me to Happy New Year (2014).
Charlie (Shah Rukh Khan) is not happy. He's a street fighter, and as the film opens he's competing in a very female-gazey match, complete with a lot of mud and water and lingering close-ups of his abs. Charlie is supposed to throw the fight. He's ready and willing to throw the fight . . . until his opponent tries to needle him by calling him the son of a thief. Instead, he delivers a brutal beatdown and leaves, and the terrifying gangster he was working for apparently gives up and completely disappears from the movie.
Later, Charlie is relaxing in his very spacious apartment (street-fighting pays much better than I would have expected, apparently) when he learns that a shipment of priceless diamonds will be kept in the vault of the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai for one night, Christmas Eve, and will be protected by the security company owned by Charan Grover (Jackie Shroff.) And that's when Charlie reveals that this is actually a heist movie.
Every heist movie requires a team, and Charlie recruits Jag (Sonu Sood), a military veteran and movie special effects expert who is deaf in one ear; Tammy (Boman Irani), an epileptic safe cracker; Rohan (Vivaan Shah), hapless teenaged nerd and super hacker); and Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan), a drunken idiot who happens to look exactly like Charan Grover's son Vicky.
Charlie has a plan, and it can work, if everybody plays their part. Step one, naturally, is to enter the World Dance Competition, which is sort of like Eurovision, only for dance. They don't have to win the competition; they don't really even have to qualify, since they have a hacker handy, but they do need to pass the first round of auditions. Cue a training montage filled with silly dancing and pop culture references.
But they're still terrible. The team needs a coach, since this is now a sports movie. Nandu suggests his childhood friend, Mohini (Deepika Padukone), a bar dancer with the soul of an artist. They get off to a rocky start, but Mohini soon whips them into a sort of shape; they don't actually become good, but what they do is mostly recognizable as dancing. Meanwhile, Mohini is enthralled by Charlie's drive and English skills and abs, and the pair start to creep towards maybe starting a relationship. (She can do better, but I'll get to that later.)
Mohini does not know about the heist, and she certainly isn't in the loop when the rest of the team cheat their way into becoming Team India. All she knows is that they are on their way to Dubai, to represent their country. Unfortunately, nobody likes them, because they're terrible dancers. And the leader of the North Korean team (Jason Tham) picks a completely gratuitous fight with Charlie. And worst of all, the diamonds are delayed for a week, so the team of terrible dancers absolutely has to get through the first round of the competition. The success of the heist movie depends upon the success of the sports movie.
This is a Farah Khan movie, which means that wild swings in genre and tone are to be expected; in one scene Jag uses cartoon physics to defeat a group of bouncers with silly names, and in another we learn the tragic secret of what happened to Charlie's father and exactly why everybody is so set on taking down Charan. As usual, Khan packs the movie with stuff that she thinks is cool, which makes for a dizzying pace. It is a long movie, but it does not feel like a long movie.
The film does have some flaws. The humor is generally pretty broad, which means some of the jokes are cheap shots or play to stereotypes, and both Tammy's epilepsy and Jag's hearing loss are used for cheap laughs more than once.
I'm more bothered by the romantic track, though. I get what the movie is trying to do; Mohini's attraction to Charlie plays up a number of tropes of Bollywood romance while reversing the gender; in one scene, for instance, she's so busy staring at Charlie that she doesn't hear a word that he's saying. That's cute and all, but it's not really healthy. More seriously, Charlie is kind of a jerk who is constantly saying well-meaning but tone deaf things about Mohini's social class and job. He doesn't really show her respect, and Mohini is all about demanding respect. It's not something that she should give up on; no amount of English or abs is worth that.
On the other hand, this is a movie about change, about how life can change in an instant whether you're ready or not, and about how if there's a change you want to see happen, you can't just wait for fate. Charlie is beginning to change himself by the end of the film, and Mohini is pursuing her own dreams rather than waiting around for him. It's a new year, and anything can happen.
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