Fanney Khan

They managed to get Anil Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Rajkumar Rao in one movie and yet Fanney Khan was a huge letdown. Based on the 2002 Belgian film Everybody’s famous, Fanney Khan has a severely underdeveloped script that after a point just becomes a feast of illogical events. Baring a few scenes that have Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Rajkumar Rao that generates engaging humor, Fanney Khan has little to inspire you.

Prashanth is this 50-year-old man who is called Fanney Khan by the ones who knows his passion for singing. He couldn’t become the singer he wished to be and when a girl child was born he named her Lata hoping to make her a singer. Lata grew up and she aspired to become someone like Baby Singh and singing sensation. Long story short, Prashanth at one point manages to kidnap Baby Singh and the movie Fanney Khan is actually about how Prashanth uses this opportunity to get a platform for his daughter who got repeatedly body shamed at all her auditions.

The movie is so terrible in its writing process that I don’t wish to go into the “parent forcing kid” politics of the story. Whatever I have said in the above paragraph was pretty much there in the trailer of the movie. So the obvious curiosity of the viewer here will be to know how they have developed this one-liner kind of idea into a fully fledged story. Well, that’s where the movie struggles heavily. Atul Manjrekar is struggling with the screenplay in building a premise. The songs are frequently happening in the first half an hour making me feel that they are just skipping through the portions. After the kidnapping, the humor comes into the movie and I must admit that the naïve Rajkumar Rao was hilariously entertaining. Then the “eventful” climax portion of the movie happens where you are just clueless about how such a thing could happen and the imagination of the writers is so wild that you just can’t look at the emotional aspect of that climax.

The performances in this movie are all really good. Anil Kapoor is an energy package and he manages to play with that energy to portray that dreamer dad with conviction. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has fairly less screen time here as a majority of her portion is inside the hideout. She also manages to add conviction to the talent part of the glamour girl avatar of Baby Singh. My favorite was Rajkumar Rao who perhaps doesn’t have much of relevance in the film. But his performance is so natural and the comedy timing is so precise that I just wished I could see his character Adhir in more frames. Pihu Sand makes a pretty impressive debut as Lata and her performance in the climax portion was fabulous. Divya Dutta, Satish Kaushik, Girish Kulkarni etc. are the other actors in prominent roles.

Atul Manjrekar’s treatment is too loud and he isn’t trying to convey anything with subtlety. Characters don’t look so rooted and he isn’t even taking any time to establish them. After a hurried introduction of the characters and the conflicts, the movie enters the crucial part of the kidnapping and how it goes on to become this “sensational” ending is through a series of events that the director and writers don’t feel like explaining to the audience. The biggest singing competition’s live finale will have a candidate with no history of past glory and nobody will question that. And the way they have shown the TRP drama is way too over the top that it will make even the unbearable TRP drama’s we see on real TV look sensible. Music from Amit Trivedi has the feel to its credit and I really enjoyed the Badan Pe Sitare Sonu Nigam version as Anil Kapoor performed it with his trademark energy. The technical aspects like the cinematography and edits are all fine but if the story doesn’t work, then nothing else really matters.

A messed up script is the villain for Fanney Khan. It is a movie that wasted all the acting talent involved in it. It is not a Housefull or Golmaal to disregard logic. Fanney Khan pushes the creative liberty too much to make it look like an unreal story.

Rating: 2/5