SO LITTLE TO OFFER

Banner: United Seven Creation.
Producer: Ganesh Jain. Co-producer: Ramesh Jain
Director: Sameer Malkan. Music: Rajesh Roshan. Lyrics: Indivar, Javed Akhtar and Maya Govind
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Raveena Tandon, Sonali Bendre, Moushumi Chatterjee, Shakti Kapoor, Dalip Tahil and Anupam Kher.

United Seven Creation’s Keemat, a Venus Music presentation, though not exactly a take-off from Sholay, has a fair amount of similarities with that hit film of the seventies. The similarities, of course, are in the passing and they would not have been jarring had the director Sameer Malkan applied his mind to ingeniously placing them in the context of the film. Short of this, Akshay Kumar’s `ruff and tuff’ execution of the action scenes and Saif Ali Khan’s disarming display of affected simplicity through his endearing histrionics, hopefully, will see `Keemat’ through at the box-office. And that is saying a lot for a film which has very little to offer by way of entertainment.

Given the thin story content, conceived not originally by Sayed Sultan, the veteran Sachin Bhaumick could not possibly have written a tightly-hewn screenplay to maintain the pace of the narration. That being so, one scene does not seem to follow the other in a logical order and the film ends up being a bundle of unrelated sequences held together forcefully by the thin story-line.

If the story of `Sholay’ revolved around two jail-birds, Jay and Veeru, risking their lives fighting against the dreaded `daku’ Gabbar Singh on behalf of an irrepressible `thakur’, `Keemat’ is the story of two street-smart boys, Dev (Akshay Kumar) and Ajay (Saif Ali Khan), unwittingly finding themselves taking up cudgels on behalf of a school teacher Dinanath Tripathi (Anupam Kher) to put an end to the evil designs of an excommunicated `thakur’ (Dalip Tahil) and village zamindar Wajanlal (Shakti Kapoor). The battle won, the film ends with Dev and Jay being adopted by Dinanath Tripathi to get over the grief for the death of his own son Mohan (Ravi Kissan), who is accidentally `killed’ by the duo.

Of the film’s female protagonists Raveena Tandon and Sonali Bendre, while the former in the role of Sharmilee acquits herself well as a sexy siren, the latter playing Mansi just looks pretty and that’t just what she is required to do in the film. Moushumi Chatterjee, as Dinanath’s wife, proves her acting abilities and so does Anupam Kher, as goog as ever. Music by Rajesh Roshan is nothing out of the ordinary. The only catchy tune he has come up with is in the song `o meri chaila’, penned by Indivar and rendered by Kavita Krishnamurthy and Alka Yagnik. Thomas A. Xavier’s camera work is competent.