No Sheen In Singh Is Bliing

Ten minutes into Singh Is Bliing and it suddenly struck me that the film is a shockingly random beast which serves no purpose - whether it is in terms of mindless entertainment, telling a compelling story or finding a unique place in the larger realm of cinema.

It runs in a world where bullmastiffs are passed off as lions (of course, there is a saffron mane thrown in for safe measures), goats talk to each other and people getting run over with a reversing car is meant to entice humour.


Akshay Kumar is the stereotypical happy-go-lucky sardar, who like the film, hasn't found meaning in life and indulges in over-the-top buffoonery to kill time. Tired of his hopeless ways, Daddy packs him off to Goa where he's assigned to "take care" of Amy Jackson, daughter of an arms dealer and who's flown in from Romania in search of her missing mother. And that's about it.

This is established in the first 30 minutes and the rest of the film is a rehash of the first half-an-hour with negligible attempt in taking the story forward. It is so boringly repetitive that watching a windmill video in loop could be more entertaining. If you walked out of the theatre, met a couple of your cousins in the lobby below, shopped a little and came back, the film would still be playing and you wouldn't have missed much.


Having played a turbaned slacker countless times in the past, Akshay appears comfortable in his zone. However, he seems to act with a sincerity equalled only by a producer who's mortgaged his house for the film.

What's worth pointing out is that he successfully pulls off the most garish looking outfits you can imagine on a two-legged creature with a great body.

Women in the film aren't reduced to being eye candies (the film is produced by a woman, Ashvini Yardi). Amy Jackson, maddeningly gorgeous as she is, is quite confident with the action scenes though gets progressively weak in the emotional parts. There's a delightful sequence where she wards off the baddies while Akshay looks on helplessly and his two besties cower behind Lara Dutta for 'protection.'


Which brings us to the former Miss Universe, who sinks her teeth in a role that should have come to her much earlier in the career. She plays an inept Hindi-English translator - an ugly Betty with a Mantralaya clerk ordinariness - who manipulates the conversation according to her own liking. Tapping into her comedic potential is the only original thing about Bliing. There is psycho Kay Kay Menon too, who shows some flourishes, but is eventually reduced to being brutally beaten up by Akki.

The comedy is entirely slapstick with little wit surrounding the excessively colourful screen (Punjab looks like a state high on kaleidoscopic drugs).

With its running time and its inability to engage, Singh Is Bliing must be essentially skipped. The film's editor (Steven Bernard, known for Chennai Express and Singham) was probably led on to believe in one of the film's deeper dialogues "Cheezon ki lambai ko nahi, gehrai ko samjho."

For now, it is only lambai, no gehrai. Even the swimming pools shown in the film are not more than 5 feet deep.  

Image source: singhisbling Official website