The canine-hero’s name in the list of actors in the credit titles comes first because that’s how Akshay Kumar wants it.
This film tells you to love animals. It’s a simple straightforward premise structured around a comical plot about a gold-digger wastrel whose father leaves his billions to his dog.
Playing the predatory retriever with an evil glint in his eye and wicked smirk on his face, Kumar has a ball in the film. He does a wickedly amiable mean act trying to poison, electrocute and drown the canine. Admittedly, the characters on screen seem to enjoy themselves more than the audience. Not that we share their enjoyment.
For a large part of the narration, Entertainment is fun to watch. The script is deftly put together.
If only writer-turned-co-director Sajid-Farhad did not trip over the cascade of word-play, the going would have been much more pleasing.
Lamentably every character speaks in a tumble of puns and word play, some of them painfully plodding and self-conscious.
The character played by the comically vibrant Krushna Abhishek crams in actors’ names in every sentence. This would have been infuriatingly obtrusive in a film of a more serious nature. No such calamity befalls Entertainment.
The biggest USP of the reasonably entertaining Entertainment is that it never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously.
In the hilarious opening, where in a product-endorsement spoof with Riteish Deshmukh, Akshay establishes his character as a rogue and a charlatan, the film hops skips and jumps through hilarious hoopla, sometime generating reluctant laughter in the audience, at other times leaving you a little numbed by the fatuous flavour of the farce.
Farcical garnish
Some scenes walk on thick ice, quite literally. The moral turning-point for Akshay’s character vis-a-vis the canine happens in a scene spread out on a dangerously thin ice-bed. It defines what the film tries to achieve given its flimsy premise and nebulous moral ground.
Holding the film from falling apart is Kumar. Sporting and sometimes sparkling with his comic timing, he helps the audience over the serious silliness of some of the material in the second-half where, in a style of a cat-and-mouse game of Home Alone and Dunston Checks In, Kumar gets even with two bumbling comic villains played with anarchic gusto by Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood.
Here is where the narration needed to exercise more temperance. Here is where Entertainment errs. It doles out too much of the farcical garnish that tends to tarnish the innocence of the relationship between Dog and Man.
A blend of the mischievous and the mirthful Entertainment is a green-lit blues-chaser which tends to get carried away with its fun mood. The gags flow non-stop, accommodating a hefty amount of playing time to letting the characters grow into precocious overgrown brats.
In one sequence, when Kumar learns his father’s billions have gone to the dog, he rolls on the floor and wails like a baby.
Dare any other A-lister actor do that. Entertainment makes little sense most of the time and is not apologetic about its lowbrow aspirations.
And yes, most of Kumar’s chemistry is with his canine co-star, an imperturbable retriever who seems resigned to being thrown in the middle of a plot which he cannot make sense of.
We second that emotion.
Leading lady Tammannah has precious-little to do, and she does it not so well.
Entertainment is currently showing in the UAE.
