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Tara Rum Pum
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Rani Mukherjee. Direction: Siddharth Anand. Music: Vishal Shekhar.
When, with his first movie (Salaam Namaste), Siddharth Anand focused on live-in relationships, honestly, I liked neither the subject, nor the execution. Come Tara Rum Pum, I had similar apprehensions after watching the promos. I thought a few races, Saif the obvious winner, a love story, accident and recovery – what else?
The movie, however, is all that and a lot more. It was a pleasant relief watching a clean movie where, after a long time, you could see kids and their parents together enjoying every bit of it. Fathers didn’t have to drop their keys even once to prevent their children from seeing any particular scene.
Rajveer Singh aka RV (Saif Ali Khan) is a car pit tyre changer. On one of his lucky days, he is discovered to have excellent speeding potential by Harry (Javed Jafri) who turns out to be a NASCAR team Manager. On the same lucky day, he bumps into Radhika (Rani Mukherjee). Harry’s team – Speeding Saddles is in the dumps and with RV, he convinces his boss Billy Bhatia (Bharat Dabholkar), that they can change their fortunes. Life becomes a fantasy when RV races past competition, wins the race, wins his girl and a contract with Speeding Saddles. After opposition from her father, Radhika leaves her house to marry RV and has two kids with him. End of Flashback. From the look of it, today’s race seems different. In the last few laps, tragedy strikes. Life becomes difficult but by the end of the movie, the family has faced reality, overcome adversity and learned a few good lessons. Everybody happy – End of story.
When you have a simple storyline, you need to beef it up with good visuals and Siddharth Anand has managed to do that. With Saif and Rani looking the hip characters and the movie being shot mostly in America, it really wasn’t a tough thing to do. The tough thing was to generate excitement in the car races when the audience already knows who is going to win, and that has been done wonderfully. For true NASCAR enthusiasts, it may be a tad unreal but for novices like me (and from what I could guess in the audience), it did work; (My dad, whole of 64 years of age, pumped his fist in the air in one of the races). The races brought back memories of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, a movie I had totally loved.
Saif plays the loverboy, cool racer and adorable dad to perfection. Rani looks amazing after loosing a lot of weight for the part. The chemistry is superb. The surprise is Javed Jaafri. Honestly, in most of the movies I’ve seen him, he overacts, is loud and irritating EXCEPT when he acts for Siddharth Anand. In this movie, he has, after a long long time, what you could call a character instead of a side kick or a comic act. The support cast – the kids, cabbies etc. are adequate in their roles. Anyways, they haven’t got much to do. The music matches the mood.
All in all, it’s a feel good movie, funnily which comes with a good message for elders as well as children. The message does stand out in an amusing kind of way. It feels childlike, yet is effective. All the right things in right doses make this a very pleasant watch. Anything more or less would’ve been harmful – It’s just perfect.
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