Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone

Rated: 5.5/10

Never mind the gender benders, never mind all that Kathakali in Bharatnatyam land. Never mind the ferocious looking, unkempt, blacker than black Tamilian goondas. Never mind anything. Not Shah Rukh declaring he is 40 but acting 20, not Deepika sporting bear-thick eyebrows and twitching them up every once in a while with all the bokwas flying around her neat and clean. Never mind all that Tamil speaking without subtitles. Never mind!

For, this is an action-packed romance where cars come flying at you  more than the expected heartbeats of Shah Rukh and Deepika. Here, romance is a spoof used as an afterthought to maar dhaad. It’s a strange mix really, something that never gets mixed up into becoming a heady concoction.

There’s SRK, so there has to be romance. But there’s Rohit Shetty too, so there can’t be much of anything other than over-the-top action laced with some kind of humour. In fact, so mismatched are the two forces in this one that you can feel how once in a while, Shetty remembers arre romance to bhool gayeee and inserts it then and there. So in one moment you have SRK being beaten up black and red, and in the next, him doing a Dilwale Dulhaniya act — with the girl’s father not the mother! 

In between all these flip-flops, there’s fun too. After all, SRK jaatee, khaatee, naachtee, ladtee and bokwas kartee in great south Indian style. 

Deepika looks arrestingly resplendent as the Tamil girl in Kerala sarees (never mind) though there is not much she does except look good and — apparently — speak good Tamil when she is not breaking in the ‘O’s into Hindi.

Amid all this confusion around whether it is a Hindi film in Tamil or a Tamil film in Hindi, whether it is a romance or an action film and whether it is Tamil Nadu or Kerala, Shetty manages to keep his canvas big and  exaggerations atypical. 

Does all this make senseIJ Bilkul sense nahi bantee but then neither SRK nor Shetty asked you to carry that part of the anatomy with you into their movie so that’s that!

In short, as Chennai Express catches speed from Mumbai to the virgin locales of Konkan Railways, it gathers steam, what with Deepika doing the Dilwale train act, and Shetty following it up with the big bad kaalee goondas following suit, taking SRK’s hand to come on board an attempted comedy garbed in swords and guns and blood and gore, missing a heartbeat here and there, laughing at PJs, serenading the Khan charm and then dabbling with a little bit of love too. 

Rs 300 croreIJ Mere ko nahi lagtee this was so much of a paisa vasool.