Joker is a fantasy Hindi movie from Bollywood starring Akshay Kumar and Sonakshi Sinha in the lead roles. The movie was released earlier this month. The director of this movie is Shirish Kunder. The movie has seen mixed response in the box office. Yesterday I had a chance to see the movie. So here I am writing the story of the movie along with my review. The movie was good but was a bit short in length. It was released on 31 August 2012, the movie is a small movie with low budget of 40 Crore, and till now has done a business of 20 Crore. The story of the movie is about a town called Pagalapur in which Akshay Kumar used to live. This town of Pagalapur was a mental asylum before the independence of India, after the independence in 1947, neither Pakistan nor India chose to keep it on its map. Hence the town is an independent entity in itself. The hero Akshay some how manages to leave this small town filled with mad people, and becomes a Scientist at NASA he is working on a communication machine with which he can contact aliens.
Despite all his efforts Akshay(Agastya) has failed with his machine and the sponsors of the research give him one month to complete his research. Meanwhile there is a call from his town of Paglapur that his father is ill and he should come back. Akshay along with his girlfriend Sonakshi(Diva), comes to India, to find that his people have no water to drink and none of the states in India are willing to help his town of Paglapur. He goes to various, ministers but none seem to help him. Sonakshi gets to know the strange people of Paglapur who have been living in this mad town. The people of the town are funny and non violent. You will find characters like Asrani, Shreyas Talpade in the movie but there is no such scene which will really make you laugh your lungs out. It has comedy but a rather light one.
So now, Akshay wants the people to known about his town and is thinking of ways in which he can help his town get the focus which it needs. Later Akshay comes up with a plan of fake aliens. He along with his village friends creates fake, crop circles and aliens, which attracts news channels and reporters from the across the world. People start to flood the town. Along with this media comes, Minnisha Lamba as a reporter though she has a short role, and there is nothing much even she can do to make you laugh or keep you attached to the seat.
Later one of the rivals of Akshay from America tells the media that the aliens are fake and its the villagers who have been fooling us. But only then some real aliens decend from the sky keeping the media agape. The aliens tell Akshay that his machine works and they will give him a gift after they leave. Later Akshay finds that his village has petrol under the ground and the villagers are happy to know this. The do not need any ministerial support to help their financial needs, they mock the ministers standing their and the movie ends on a happy note.
Over all the movie was a decent movie which you can watch with your kids do not expect some hi fi science fiction extraveganza from this movie. It has a mix of light comedy, some small scenes of fiction when aliens enter, a small number of non captivating songs. That is it, there is no action in the movie no guns have been used in killing anyone, army does come up to see aliens and does fire some guns but the action part is zero. The movie could have been better. The promotions have been a little less I think. But I am sure you will like it if you haven’t seen movies like Prometheus, Predators, etc if you liked Koi… Mil Gaya you might like the movie.
Overall I think the movie is a 6 out of 10 stars.
Directed by Shirish Kunder
Produced by Farah Khan
Akshay Kumar
Starring Akshay Kumar
Sonakshi Sinha
Minisha Lamba
Shreyas Talpade
Music by G. V. Prakash Kumar
Gaurav Dagaonkar
Distributed by UTV Motion Pictures
Hari Om Entertainment
Release date(s)
31 August 2012
Country India
Language Hindi
Budget INR40 crore (US$7.24 million)
Box office INR20.00 crore (US$3.62 million)(1 week nett)