'Badmaash Company'

Review

There's a longish sequence in an American eatery in the second-half of this deeply flawed and yet refreshingly cool urbane casual and yet highly cinematic work where Shahid Kapoor's Karan, by now on the road to seemingly irredeemable moral degeneration is told by his partner, played by newcomer Vir Das, that he wants out.

The way that sequence progresses and the manner in which the two actors play out a conventional friends-falling-apart moment, just makes you forgive all the excesses of inflated self-worth that the script suffers from in the last 90 minutes of this endearing though exasperating experience.

The main characters, four friends bonded by the collective will to grow rich overnight, go through a series on caper experiences. Not all of it is either convincing or even interesting. After a point, we know exactly where this quartet is hurling to. And the slide out of moral degeneration is never touching enough to make us shed a tear for these misguided over-reachers.

The doom comes none too soon, and then the narrative proceeds without a proper graph. By the time Karan (Shahid Kapoor)'s spunky girl Bulbul (Anushka Sharma) leaves him the script begins to look like one of those subverted morality tales from the house of the Bhatts where the heroes talk with clenched fists and heroines weep in their pillows as their companions come home in a drunken stupor.