'Khatta Meetha', a satirical swipe at corruption

By Subhash K. Jha

Film: "Khatta Meetha"; Starring: Akshay Kumar, introducing Trishna Krishnan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda; Directed by: Priyadarshan; Rating: ***



First things first. This is not, repeat not, a comedy. Not by any yardstick. For those expecting a typical Priyadarshan-Akshay Kumar comedy "Khatta Meetha" is not your cup of tee-hee. For those who know there's a more reflective and ruminative side to both the prolific director and the leading man, here's the thing.

"Khatta Meetha" takes stinging satirical swipes at the epidemic disease of corruption that has taken over the Indian ethos. Tragically the treatment is quite often heavyhanded. But the statement never drowns in the diatribe. Priyadarshan tends to fill up the outer edges with a profusion of incidental characters and over-elaborate gags and jokes that hold themselves in place in a world of unmitigated chaos like "De Dana Dan".

Here the clutter and the clamour just make you feel the director needed to respect his own tone of sobriety in this longish tickling treatise on malpractices in the middleclass.

The plot is a bit of a tangle. Akshay Kumar's family of discontented mal-paani-practitioners is a universe of brutish brothers and screechy sisters-in-law, and silently-suffering parents (played by those wonderful actors Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Aroona Irani).

It's a family of corrupt road contractors and initially, Akshay seems the most wickedly immoral of them all. But hang on! As the narrative - at time plodding - moves forward we begin to understand the wacked - out sinister yet satirical, chaotic yet orderly, corrupt yet weirdly - ethical world of Sachin ...