7 Things Weirder In Laxmii Than The Film

Raghava Lawrence’s  Laxmii is  a very strange  film. It’s all about the  spirit of a transgender person that enters Akshay Kumar… and then he  starts behaving strangely. But before that there are other  things happening in  the  film which are even stranger than the Bhoot re-Bhoot.

1.     Akshay and Kiara Advani who  play  husband and  wife  share more chemistry in Good Newz  where they  were  not paired with one another. How did that happen?  The lead pair  in Laxmii  looks like two strangers swapping  corny dialogues in  a house crawling with lunatics.

2.     Akshay’s  heroines are  becoming  more and  more hazily projected  in his films. They  are  being played  by second-row  and third-row leading ladies  because  the scripts he’s doing cannot justify  the presence  of  any A-lister heroines.

3.     How did Akshay agree  to  be part of  such a half-baked script?  The  characters  come and go at random. The  little kid in the beginning who is introduced  to us as Akshay’s  nephew,disappears  in the second half. Maybe he went out in search of a script and  never returned.Eerie!

4.     Akshay , we are told, is Asif  a  Muslim do-gooder who  fights andh-vishwas(blind faith) and  yet by the time  time plot gathers momentum the  bhoot  of  a murdered trans-gender  enters  his   body and soul. So are we  being told that those of us like  Asif who  scoff at  bhoot-pret and blind faith are stupid  misguided souls?That in fact  spooky spirits are all around us waiting to enter  our bodies.More dangerous  than the Covid?

5.     Akshay’s saas –sasur   are played by  two extremely  talented actors Rajesh Sharma and Ayesha Raza Mishra. I wonder how trained actor like them were so happy hamming heftily? Kudos to the director for  stripping down talented  actors to their bare essentials,reducing them to streetside monkeys.

6.     The  only exception is  Sharad Kelkar who plays  the  transgender Laxmii with conviction . He gets to  give  a rousing speech at the  end on  the  travails  of  being  the  Third Sex. He also gets the  body-language of  a  kinnar (eunuch) right. Kelkar is the only actor who  get to be  convincing.Lucky chap.

7.     Akshay Kumar plays  neither man  nor woman , he is not even the  third sex. He is  the  fourth sex. The trance gender, if you will.He owes the  transgender community  no  apology. His gender-challenged ghost is a  world apart.