The Shaukeens
- Akshay Kumar as Akshay kumar
- Anupam Kher as Lali
- Annu Kapoor as KD
- Piyush Mishra as Pinky
- Lisa Haydon as Ahana
- Rati Agnihotri as Mrs. Lalwani[7]
- Abhishek Bachchan in a special appearance
- Kareena Kapoor in a special appearance
- Sunil Shetty in a special appearance
- Michelle in a special appearance in the song "Meherbani"
Reviews
This film is a disaster all right, but it is mitigated somewhat by a quirky if uneven subplot that has Akshay playing himself and poking constant fun at the work that he has done thus far as a Bollywood actor.
As he shoots a regular flick in Mauritius, the star awaits the arrival of a director named Ranjit Basu (Subrat Dutta).
This guy has numerous National Awards in his kitty and he has supposedly rustled up a role that could rescue Akshay from the Rs 100-crore rut.
Desperate to win a National Award of his own, Akshay gives the deadly boring director a long rope even as he spouts pretentious mumbo-jumbo about method acting and getting into the skin of a character.
Akshay does heed the man's sage advice, but not quite in the way that one would have imagined.
Matters spiral out of control and not the least because of the repeated intrusions into the actor's make-up tent by a crazy female fan.
But all this is only secondary to the main narrative, and it is here that the film comes completely unstuck.
Written by Tigmanshu Dhulia and directed by Abhishek Sharma (Tere Bin Laden), this is an update of the 1982 Basu Chatterjee comedy, Shaukeen. It turns out to be an exercise that can only be described as ill-advised.
Shaukeen is the third early 1980s Hindi comedy (after Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Khubsoorat) to be remade in the span of a year.
The returns have been meager and yet it is unlikely that Bollywood is going to give up any time soon.
Devoid of the innocence and spontaneity that helped the three older comedies rise above their limitations and attain longevity, The Shaukeens shows why the classics should be left alone.
It isn't just Shaukeen that this film mercilessly cannibalizes. It also filches elements from 1971's Guddi and weaves into its messy mish-mash the story of a girl hopelessly infatuated with a movie star.
