Raees~ Once upon a time in Gujarat

Release date-  25th January 2017 

One Word which describes the film- Mediocre

Best Dialogues- 

SRK- 'Mai Dharm ki Rajneeti nahi karta' 

Nawazuddin- 'Bacche ka baap Bana hai, Gujarat ka nahi.' 

Mhd Zeeshan- 'Neeyat bandh ke khada hai, ab sajda kar ke hi manega.'

Genre- Crime/ Thriller

Music- Ram Sampath

Producer- Gauri Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Ritesh Sidwani

Story- Rahul Dholakia, Haritha Mehta, Ashish Vashi, Neeraj Shukla

Direction-Rahul Dholakia

Cast- Shahrukh Khan, Mahira Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Mhd Zeeshan, Atul Kulkarni

Budget- 75 Crores approximately excluding Shahrukh Khan's remuneration

Once upon a time in Gujarat, there lived a man called Abdul Latif who began his career as a gambler-turned-bootlegger, and later made a thriving career in organised crime.

In 1986 when he was in prison, Latif contested from five municipal seats and won all of them. After few years he was booked as a terrorist under the TADA Act and on November 29, 1997, he died in an encounter.

Rahul Dholakia along with three others superficially took these pointers from Abdul Latif's story, copied the one liner style from Once upon a time in Mumbai, created a hate chemistry between Shahrukh and Nawazuddin because obviously there was not enough love between Shahrukh and Mahira and as a last thought added a Sunny Leone item number too.

So we got a film which just after the extended weekend was over, started losing viewers.

Shahrukh Khan plays the role of a bootlegger turned lover, turned husband, turned murderer, turned father, turned social worker, turned politician, turned terrorist by mistake, turned revenge seeker and in between also trying to be like Amitabh Bachchan by fighting for the Mill Mazdoors, that you wonder why other talented actors like Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayub, Atul Kulkarni, Narendra Jha, Jaideep Alahawat etc were even in the film.

Even after Shahrukh Khan has earned a fortune, he single handedly goes and beats the leader of the opposition because he had organised a rally which was bad for his 'dhanda'. (Sigh!)

Mahira Khan has been giving interviews about how she's missing being a part of the film's promotions.

Till interval she just had 2-3 scenes and we didn't even know what her character was called.

But then, Raees was not about the hero's love for her, it was only about his obsession for his 'hashtag' 'dhanda'

"Jo dhande ke liye sahi woh sahi jo dhande ke liye galat woh galat, isse zyada kabhi socha nahi."

In the promos, we were shown how Nawazuddin Siddiqui tries to make it difficult for Raees to conduct his 'dhanda' smoothly but in the film we see him just saying powerful dialogues and Raees managing to escape the police just by smuggling his liquor bottles in Bullock carts instead of trucks or by using ferries. If only smuggling was that easy everyone would have become a bootlegger!!

In the second half there is also this conversation between them

Nawaz- "Aaj kal din ache chal rahe hai tere"

SRK- "Din aur raat logon ke hote honge, sheron ka zamana hota hai."

We wonder if suddenly Nawazuddin has joined SRK's fanclub.

The story had so many loopholes that if Shahrukh Khan wasn't in it, it wouldn't even have managed to recover it's production cost.

The songs are very average and they just keep popping up in the film without any context.

Shahrukh Khan, who in the starting of his career didn't mind playing totally negative characters like in 'Darr' or 'Anjaam' has tried to make the gangster look so good that neither we could love him enough nor we could hate him, so we have no other option but to forget him.

For all those Shahrukh fans who keep defending his films without having a logical answer, I would like to ask them that if after 2 years you are asked to choose between Chak De India and Raees, which one will you watch?

In a line, Raees is another attempt by SRK to give a masala blockbuster which will be added to the list of his other non-brainer films like Chennai Express, Happy New Year, Dilwale etc.

Time-pass.