Director: Sajid-Farhad
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Tamannaah Bhatia, Mithun Chakraborty, Prakash Raj, Sonu Sood, Johnny Lever, Krushna Abhishek
I love dogs. They are good people. And Akshay Kumar in full throttle has been known to raise a nifty paw or two. Dog and star come together in a flick that promises to entertain us. We know this because it is called Entertainment, just in case we are in the danger of missing the point. But it is the film which misses the point entirely: it is dull and loud, with a brow so lowered that it reaches the floor.
Apart from being a woman?s best friend, dogs can be a hoot. It?s impossible to be bored around them. But even the poor golden retriever, who goes by the name of Entertainment doesn?t get to have any fun because he is buried in stuff which the film?s directors deem funny. Which is, simply, this: crowd the film with the corniest of dialogue (it starts off faintly funny in the beginning, and gets old too soon), bung in as many crotch jokes as possible (one clutched crotch may be okay, but a series of grown men clutching their privates, not once, but several times over, as a source of ?comedy??), and coast on crassness.
The debutant directors have written such films as Golmaal Returns, Ready and Housefull 2, so the dialogue, laced with Bollywood jokes and a running Ekta Kapoor gag, comes as no surprise. Neither does the discovery that the film lurches from one scene to another without bothering too much about plot. When all you want is for your actors to mouth a line, a story is pointless extravagance.
Average joe Akhil (Kumar), accompanied by his pal (Abhishek), goes in search of his rightful inheritance and finds his billionaire father?s favourite pet, Entertainment, ahead of him. Along come two villainous fellows, one called Karan (Sood), and the other, yes kiddies, is Arjun (Raj). Akhil?s girl (Bhatia), and her father (Chakraborty) also show up. Johnny Lever is already at the scene doing the Johnny Lever thing, widening his eyes, and being the butt of risible jokes arising from his name, which decency will not allow me to repeat.
That leaves us with Akshay Kumar, the star of this enterprise
who is in practically every scene, without once letting the dog take over. It?s really tough to snatch attention away from animals and babies because they are such scene-grabbers, but if there?s nothing solid written for them, what can the poor critters do?
One potentially great scene, involving the word kuttey, along with the name Basanti, is thrown away in the end-credits. If only the writers had riffed some more on those lines, Entertainment would have been truly entertaining. Doggone, I protest.
