BOX OFFICE "UPDATE" LAKEER A FLOP

Glass ceiling broken
By: Dinesh Raheja
May 12, 2004
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Main Hoon Na’s young director, Farah Khan, is in an enviable position. She is all set to become the first woman to challenge the box-office monopoly of male directors.

Though women directors like Sai Paranjpye, Deepa Mehta, Aparna Sen and company have enjoyed critical successes in the past, their films have, at best, enjoyed small-scale success and at most times not exactly set the box-office afire.

To Farah Khan, and even to those distributors who had lost faith in the draw of Hindi films, Shah Rukh Khan reaffirms — Main Hoon Na. As far as first week collections go, Khan’s kooky khichdi has beaten corny comedy Masti by a wide berth of Rs 49 lakh. What’s more, Main Hoon Na has been the biggest first week grosser for Shah Rukh so far.

In recent years, the ranking of Shah Rukh’s highest first week grossers in Mumbai reads as follows:

• Main Hoon Na: Rs 194 lakh
• Kal Ho Naa Ho: Rs 155.4 lakh
• Devdas: Rs 123 lakh
• K3G: Rs 102 lakh
• Chalte Chalte: Rs 98 lakh

Amongst other box-office distinctions, Main Hoon Na (MHN) has earned three times more than Shah Rukh’s earlier home production Asoka (Rs 60 lakh) did in its first week.

MHN has eaten into the business of Masti (last week Rs 60.3 lakh, this week Rs 33.7 lakh), though Murder hasn’t lost much blood (last week Rs 25.8 lakh, this week Rs 17.7 lakh). Bardaasht is unable to bear the combined competition of the three ruling ‘M’ films and collects a paltry Rs 2.6 lakh in its second week.

Sheen, which tackles the sensitive issue of the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, loses some of its box-office sheen on the first day itself. The other release of the week, Charas, is a well-intentioned, seeking-to-be-trenchantly-topical film about drug trafficking — only don’t expect a traffic-stopper or a film as fascinatingly calibrated as the Michael Douglas-starrer Traffic.

Unlike earlier Indian films on drugs (Hare Rama Hare Krishna, the 1976 Charas), here there’s no major character as a junkie, so there’s scant emotional pull as the horror of addiction is not replayed before your eyes.
Instead, the film seeks to be a fast-paced thriller with international intrigue (the Italian mafia debuts in Hindi films), subterfuges and disguises galore (both heroes, Jimmy Shergill and Uday Chopra, are undercover agents, while Namrata Shirodkar is a journalist travelling incognito).

Everyone is on the trail of a policeman (Irrfan Khan) whose hideout in the Himalayas is the nucleus of a multi-crore drug racket. There are involving moments of high tension (the sequence dealing with Uday and Irrfan’s past) but generally, the film has pacing and plausibility problems — there are just too many co-incidences and Policeman, whose drug empire supposedly rivals that of Columbia, seems to have barely a dozen ill-equipped henchmen to put up a defence in the climax. Charas faces a stone-y path ahead with Main Hoon Na hogging the headlines and other major releases crowding the multiplexes.