Review: Kurbaan – Jihad Ho Na Ho

(Looooong post, kindly adjust)
We generally try not to give away the plot and thrust our opinions on people and be unbiased, but then there are exceptions. The weird thing being that, the stuff that I find trashy is sometimes received so well by others that it just boggles me. But then who cares, for after all the internet is one large trashcan of opinions. So here we are adding kilobytes of our worthless bauble to the information superhighway and present our view which may seem rehashed, for almost everyone has already reiterated the same! This week saw the release of another flick from the stables of Dharma productions and Karan Johar seems to be going the RGV way with this proteges. Kurbaan is yet another take on fundamentalism in islam and how there are a few good musalmaan out there. Well not that we already knew that and thats not why the movie was made. What about the plot you may ask, well then there’s nothing that you haven’t seen or heard about before. It pains me to break it to you that a whole movie was canned on the pretext of  a money-shot that included a backless beauty and a bullet-ridden chest. Someone got the idea of a great promotional poster, something that has never been tried before and decided toe weave a movie around it. So what happens when you build a movie around an advertising gimmick to get you some eyeballs? Well it is the same as the hawker who shrieks at the top of his voice to sell his wares when they are poorly made, and depends on his sales pitch to make them sell rather than quality.  It more seems like an appetizer for the mega budget My Name Is Khan, like spring rolls in a Chinese restaurant. With New York, we saw the YashRaj version of terrorism and now the next biggest production house, Dharma Productions gets into the act.  Guess we now await UTV and PNC to whip up their versions for us to savor.

The Dharma Productions guide to making a terrorist movie

First and foremost you need to look  darn good with a goatee and wavy hair. Else you never going to get noticed by the single hot professor chick. Also you better chose a girl who dumb enough to buy your shit, but not very dumb because you need her to have a US-Visa and all the other legal stuff. Of course you can thank allah when you profuse love to her, for she isn’t going to see through that anyways. When you’re making out in the staff room and other popular Delhi landmarks, the girl is surely not going to pay attention to why you prefer to thank allah
for
all the snoggingthank allah for all the snogging you received.  Then you wait for the goodie-bag moment wherein most couples would break up citing the logistics of long distance relationships. You then go the extra-mile and propose marriage instead. When a woman is pretty low expecting to breakup, the idea of marriage with you sacrificing your career for her and offering to start all over is sure to be lapped up.  Now unless she is a hard-core feminist, it can comfortably assumed that she wouldn’t have an iota of doubt of your intentions when you offer to travel as a dependent. Just because the girl is dumb, doesn’t mean her father will be the same, but that is where you rely on your dialog-baazi. When quizzed upon how his daughter will be received in your family, you just retort by asking him to take you in. Now no father can comeback from such a heavy dose of sentiment that just hits the spot. You are then assured a free hand in the wedding without any references, background details or presence of friends and family at the ceremony.

When you step foot in the US and clear immigration, you can sing another song around the popular NY landmarks and do the lovey-dovey couple thingy. Make while house-hunting, you make sure she finds the ad about an Indian community thereby making it seem that you were merely agreeing to check out the place. Since we’ve already established that your wife is pretty dumb, it is pretty safe to assume that she is not going to find it weird most women in the community wear hijabs and walk with
their heads kept lowwear hijabs and walk with their heads kept low. She might feel strange when the women don’t sit with the men, take care of homes, do not work or talk openly, and behave all submissive to get beaten up by their husbands. You however need to be careful for one of these submissive wives could harbor thought of free speech and leak information to your wife. Don’t worry however, for you can easily shut your wife up by telling her to stay out of things that don’t include her and not encroach on the neighbor’s private lives. When your neighbors free-thinking wife mysteriously disappears, you wife may try to contact her reporter friend and liberal musilm fiancée. Now the way to identify a liberal muslim according to the Dharma productions guide is to look for a beard. Clean-shaven jeans-wearing american-accent putting muslims are liberal, while the rest aren’t.

When the heroine in a movie says that she has a doctors appointment, it could only mean one of two things. Screen time is devoted only when the heroine is either pregnant or diagnosed with
a terminal diseasethe heroine is either pregnant or diagnosed with a terminal disease. Thankfully in our case it is the former, for we have other people who are yet to be bumped off. generally when women find out that they are pregnant, they goto the nearest ‘Babies R Us‘, or start eating weird things like raw mangoes and tamarind. Wives of terrorists however snoop around the neighborhood to eavesdrop on a terror attack being planned on a plane. Upon finding the corpse of the free-thinking hijab-wearing neighbor, instead of calling the cops they run to their husbands. Now that your dumb wife confided to you instead of the cops, your mission is still safe and you can finally come out of the closet. By closet, we don’t mean ‘the closet‘, but merely revealing your true identity. It must be observed that jihadis are never gay, why in the world will they otherwise sacrifice themselves just so that they can be with 72 virgins! Her being dumb requires you to elaborately explain your plan and how you had her eating out of your hand all the while. While you ponder on letting your wife to live, she is busy trying to get someone on the phone. With nobody picking up thrice, you begin to wonder if the cops are also in the scheme. Just that it dawns that you overestimated her intelligence for a while, she wasn’t trying to get the cops but instead prevent reporter friend from boarding the ill-fated flight which anyways ends up in a fireball and ends up leaving a voicemail.

The liberal muslim reporter fiancé, though distraught by his loss comes to work the next day only to find the shocking voicemail waiting for him. Just because he is liberal doesn’t guarantee any intelligence and rightfully so, instead of calling the cops he decides to take matter into his own hands and attempts to join the terror outfit. The easiest way to join a terror outfit is to take a class on Islam and then go foul mouthing
the UStake a class on Islam and then go foul mouthing the US about atrocities against the muslim brethren in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you have to dispose a body and get pulled over by cops then don’t panic, just go around shooting madly and blow up your car while getting shot in the crossfire. We do need your bloody bullet-ridden chest for the poster, for if you remember that is how this movie began in the first place. If there is one thing that John Rambo has taught us then that would be to remove bullets using sharp objects. In such cases your psychology professor wife can double up as a nurse and not only remove the bullet, but also treat the wound. Having lost a man in the car accident, you invite your new liberal muslim student to take his place in your dastardly plan. Having judged his courage after he points a gun to a sandwich stall owner, you let him in on all your plans of blowing up the subway system without any background checks. When your new recruit asks your wife for help on retrieving info on the possible targets, what does she do? Well that deserves a new paragraph!

To justify the second half of the promotional poster and turn on the heat, the heroine will attempt to seduce you. Yes you read it right, despite cheating her, treating her like shit and using her to fulfill your fanaticism, she will present herself in full backless glory to give us all what we’ve been waiting for. All this effort just to steal the plans of your mission while you sleep after some hot loving time, or she could have just waited for you to sleepcould have just waited for you to sleep! Liberal boy will finally call the FBI but divulge no details, when this was something he ought to have done many reels before. Jihadis may seem stupid but aren’t actually, and they pull ahead their plans to blow the subway, just in case someone got smart. Now you pack away the women in hijabs to go buy powder-lipstick while you and your band of merry men board the trains with bags full of bombs. What are the chances that at the very last moment, our reporter boy’s cover will be blown? Pretty high infact and the best way to handle a traitor situation is to shoot like crazy in a train during rush-hour. Now your mastermind will get shot and while you fear the failure of your mission, he will reveal that it is the women who are infact carrying the bombs and hence all is well. You quickly pull out your cutting pliers and defuse the bomb you are carrying.

What about the women and more specifically you wife and soon-to-be-born child? There stands the directorThere stands the director, and this masterclass twist. You will suddenly out of nowhere have a change of heart and turn a new leaf, just like that. Of course we shall offer some lame explanation that you already lost a wife and child in the past, and hence don’t wish for history to repeat itself. Our FBI officers will now finally show up and locate another jihadi, only for him to blow himself up. In a fitting tribute to Vijaykanth/Sunny Deol, despite being a few feet from the explosion our officer will walk away witha few bruises and alarm all stations to find the others. Clearly we seem to be enjoying blowing up stations and hence shall have another bahadur officer who will give his jaan-ki-baazi to defuse a bomb in an empty station and cut the wrong wires. You shall finally manage to trace your wife and blow the brains of the afghani female to smithereens,and then defuse the bomb. But then the rules don’t allow jihadis to stay alive even if they had a change of heart, and hence you shall be met with the same fate. But don’t worry, you managed to blow up an aeroplane, two subways and will get your 72 virgins in heaven. From where we see it, seems like a win-win situation! Hey, we atleast learnt to weave a movie around a promo poster, and that is something my friends!

(Image Courtesy: Glamsham)