Critical view of Cash

Courtesy: IndiaFM
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Curb your tendency to run the gamut of the pun. Cash is no trash. It's as nonsensically nifty as any of those cool capers from Hollywood like Ocean's Dus, gyarah, barah….whatever!

Dus director Anubhav Sinha goes bust….women of every shape and size show up on screen to giggle and heave. And take on the boys in the game of acquisition. In one item song which goes Rahem kare, Choreographer Rajiv Goswami makes the Brazillian bombshell point her palm to an unmentionable part of her anatomy.

And still, Cash steers as far away from any hint of vulgarity as conceivable. The hot babes with their catch-me-if-can attitude match steps in the strip-and-groove game with the cool dudes in their never-ending collection of designer glasses.

Is Cash co-sponsored by Ray-ban? If it is, then this is as close as director Sinha comes to Satyajit Ray in this urbane caper that goes from hot chick to ubane chic at the flick of trendy wrist.

Or wait ….is Cash a free-flowing endorsement for sun-tan lotion? As the cast gets sensuously and seductively soaked in the Cape Town sun you look for the South Africa that director Feroz Abbas Khan visits in the other release this Friday on the life of Gandhi and his son.

There are no fathers and sons in Cash. But Suniel Shetty(looking extra-dapper and supremely suave in his svelte suits and, yes, cool sunglasses) has an adopted uncle with whom he does dirty deals and finally shoots pointblank.

The point, if you must know is…there's no point to this heera-heist. Anubhav Sinha gate-crashes into a zone of singy amorality where boys try to be men and men try to get extra-pally with the women.

James Bond meets Brij Sadanah in this coolly contemporized version of Sadanah's Chori Mera Kaam.

Diamonds may be forever. Cash makes them dazzle and sparkle for two hours of sinful designer-entertainment. Stylishly mounted and edited to the point of conveying a cutting edge of glistening gaiety to even a casual conversation on the road, Cash provides a crash-course in how to make a celluloid diamond-heist not go to waste.

Waist is where the plot gets its wriggle. Shamita Shetty is specially spunky and spicy as she woos the rather oddly made-up Ajay Devgan. Yup, she's the one to watch. Devgan plays a delectably subverted Superman-styled double-life character. For Shamita he's a mellow peace-loving writer. For Diya Mirza(who also has the hots for Suniel Shetty….these gold-digging diamond dames…I tell you!) Devgan is a Santa-Banta reciting entertainer-cum-heist-merchant.

After a while it becomes hard to tell who's doing what to whom and why. Screenwriters Yash-Vinay go back to all the capers from Victoria 203 to Dhoom... and come up with a crime-pays saga that keeps the adrenaline flowing and the cars, motorboats and choppers move.

The dialogues and situations are genuinely funny…specially the exchanges between Devgan and Shetty, and between Zayed Khan and Riteish Deshmukh who play a couple of heist-hawkers who often end up trying to commit the same crime at the same place Zayed and Riteish infuse their ha-ha-ha heroism with a pop-panache. You can't touch these wannabes, really! Not with the aerial and water stunts swarming the dapper frames in motions of curled-up cosmpolitanism.

Ironically the most entertaining performance comes from Howard Roseneyer as a nose-in-the-air yatch manager pressurized by the cops to blow Ajay Devgan's lid.

There is a genre of cinema that tilts its stylish topi to the art of jalebi storytelling. Wheels wind their way into wheels, and then some more wheels in this pulse-pounding ode to the spirit of audacious derring-do.

Don't look for a linear cogent narrative design, as Anubhav Sinha merges crimes and cops, audacious animation and heart-in-the-mouth stunts in a mix that keeps you watching….numb-stop.