Aniruddha Guha reviews: 'Joker' would scare aliens away

Film: Joker
Director: Shirish Kunder
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi SInha, Shreyas Talpade, Minissha Lamba
Rating: *

The best thing I can say about Joker is that it’s better than Tees Maar Khan. That gem — the benchmark of all that is mind-numbingly terrible about Hindi films — was written, edited, given music to and produced by Shirish Kunder but directed by wife Farah Khan, who had two blockbusters to her name before she took on the onus of executing her husband’s vision, and which resulted in a humongous flop. Kunder, then, takes matters in his own hands in Joker. The fault is entirely his this time, with Kunder displaying his many talents in a film which was surprisingly green-lit, funded and then released too.

Listing out the inanities of Joker would take an obnoxiously long amount of time and effort, in addition to the two hours the film saps out of your soul watching it. But if you are feeling adventurous and enjoy living life on the edge, and hence decide to go for Joker, look out for the scene where Agastya, a scientist from NASA on the lookout for aliens (because NASA scientists do that) thinks he has spotted an other-worldly creature. Flashing a torch in the alien’s direction, he rushes towards it like a maniac, going all “Alien!” on the weird-looking creature, scaring it away in the opposite direction. In that moment, I was convinced that Joker and other such films (many of which star Akshay Kumar, though not always as a NASA scientist looking out for aliens) would be the real reason for people in the outside world to not want to make contact with earth.

Unfortunately, Joker isn’t as awful as you expect it to be, falling a few degrees short of entering the ‘So Bad It’s Good’ category, a list which has had two brilliant additions this year. Players and Jism 2 catered to those with the macabre taste for films that are so terrible at their very core – and so unintentionally funny – that you would want them in your collection of films to be watched on a drunken night with friends. Joker, sadly, doesn’t make the cut even there. Total fail.