Throwback Thursday: Ajnabee Is A Movie About Trophy Wives, Tharki Husbands And A Surprising Amount Of Dumbness

Throwback Thursday: Ajnabee Is A Movie About Trophy Wives, Tharki Husbands And A Surprising Amount Of Dumbness

I think a lot of us love looking for bloopers or watching videos of bloopers in shows like Friends or Bollywood movies. Maybe it makes us feel like geniuses to be able to find flaws in a piece of artistic work. But what do you when an entire film is a blooper? You begin to feel that if a bunch of steroids injected apes made a movie, it would probably require just a little tweaking to reach this level. So years after Ajnabee released, I sat down to watch it and while I remember the story more or less, the nitty-gritty of it just had me rolling on the floor.

The film stars Akshay Kumar (Vikram), Bipasha Basu (Sonia mostly), Bobby Deol (Raj) and Kareena Kapoor (Priya). Right at the start of the film, for three whole scenes, all you get to see is Priya praying at different religious places and feeling startled to find Raj wherever she is. She begins to suspect he is following her and she lifts an umbrella and runs for her life. As he is running to catch her, Priya begins to get even more afraid. Her umbrella is looking like the remnants of the Harappa civilisation but for some reason, between saving herself and her umbrella, she gave the latter more importance. All this while, I just wanted to tell her to throw away that ugly and really bad quality black umbrella.

So she reaches home, her dad points a gun at Raj and that’s when he explains that he is chasing her because it’s his umbrella. Wait, even he cares so much about that umbrella? What was that umbrella? Anyway, at that point you feel like laughing at their stupidity but your laughter gets overshadowed by her dad’s who laughs at everything. Like ‘Hi Raj, hahaha’ – it’s like punctuation for him.

At their second or third meeting, Raj asks Priya to marry him. Okay, he doesn’t ask her directly but lures her in to coming with him to Switzerland as the polo team is sending one coach and his wife. There. That’s his proposal. Priya has no standards either. Who needs to really know a guy before marrying him and heading off to another country? That’s overrated apparently, even though the film says ‘Never trust a stranger’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tna-TteptSc

She goes there and while she starts cooking, without really knowing how to, he gets his tharak on and they have a little atta fight because that’s how sanskaari couples make love, okay. But then Raj’s creepy side comes out when he follows the sound of music and finds a very sexy woman (Sonia) playing piano and he just stands there with a pool of drool forming at his feet. Let me warn you, it’s borderline scary because Sonia has climbed on to the piano and is playing it in positions that make it look like a scene from The Exorcist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-pBOj1-a2M

Once again, when Raj goes to return a book to Sonia, his jaw drops as he watches her naked and getting dressed after a shower. Wow. And then when they go on a vacation and Vikram asks him nonchalantly about wife swapping, he gets all riled up. Before that, he also saw a glimpse of Sonia’s tharak when she tries to force him to kiss her. Okay, this couple is crazy and any normal human being would keep their distance.

But Raj just after a little persuasion forgives Vikram and the four go for partying as nothing has happened. Wow, my cat holds a grudge against me for longer if I accidentally step on her tail. So Vikram brings up the wife-swapping idea again, and being a dharma-putra, he just cannot ignore it and tell him to fuck off. Somehow, he wakes up next to a naked woman, assumed to be Sonia and soon, is being framed by Vikram for killing her.

Now he has to prove his innocence somehow and escapes custody. He is a wanted criminal and his face is all over the news channels. Yet, he roams around without any disguise. Not even a change of clothes. I am baffled how dumb they’ve shown the police in the film. In fact, he is openly meeting Priya at church and a coffee house, and wherever. So basically, the police aren’t keeping a watch on Priya? Even the police keeping a watch around his house is shown to be so dumb. They get distracted by their neighbours who offer to treat them to a delicious Indian meal. Like wtf? If Swiss police watch this movie, they’d want to sue it.

All this was for insurance money of Vikram’s wife, the real Sonia. Bipasha was actually his girlfriend, Neeta. Now all of it gets transferred to his account and Raj tries to hack into it. And it’s shown as he’s genius and all but it’s really because Vikram was dumb enough to use the password ‘Everything is planned’ – a phrase he has only said like 1500 times in the film. Guess, everything wasn’t planned after all. Eventually, Khilaadi and Soldier end up getting into a fight, and the latter wins. Vikram and Sonia are killed off and Raj and Priya return to India because it’s not like law and authority is a thing.

ALSO READ: Throwback Thursday: Awful Sexual Misconduct And Violation Of Consent Was Haseena Maan Jaayegi’s Mainstay. Eww

In the end, you wonder what just happened and why did you witness it? So the wives were just there so the men can talk about swapping them. Raj may not be a murderer but he is definitely a creep. Vikram wasn’t as smart as he thought he was and Sonia just got killed off with a kick. I mean, it’s a shame. And mind you, throughout the movie, we never saw Raj go to work. Never. Did they sponsor his visa so he could watch another man’s wife get naked? I feel they got the genre wrong. This was supposed to be a spoof, not a thriller.

ALSO READ: Throwback Thursday: Om Jai Jagadish Promotes A Sexist Definition Of An Ideal Wife And Bahu In India

Akanksha Narang

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