Teen Patti: review

Is magic simply another word for mathematics? Is everything and everybody in this world governed by some mathematical theory or the other? Does a simple math equation have the power to change lives? A tale of gambling and greed, deception and death, Teen Patti had the potential to break new ground in Bollywood and give the audience a film to think about. But flimsy and fantastical, incoherent and pretentious, Teen Patti comes crashing down like a pack of cards.

Lacking in drama and suspense for the better part of its oh-so-long 16 reels, Teen Patti is about Venkat Subramaniam (Amitabh Bachchan), a mathematics professor whose “ideas don’t go beyond ideas” and whose research papers continue to be regularly rejected. But that is only till the eccentric genius — who “talks” to an Einstein portrait on his wall and believes that playing cards “speak” to him — chances upon a spanking new math formula that he believes can be applied to the game of teen patti, yielding winning results every time.

Egged on by his younger colleague Shantanu Biswas (Madhavan), Venkat herds a group of students to a murky Mumbai gambling den frequented by the underworld, all for the sake of testing his theory of probability and randomness in the real world. At the table, they make a killing. And then there is no looking back.

Borrowing from the 2008 Kevin Spacey thriller 21, that was in turn based on the Ben Mezrich bestseller Bringing Down The House, Teen Patti fails to generate interest, forget thrills. With the plot taking more than an hour to build up and the so-called life-altering theory consigned to the recesses of Venkat’s mind, there is little to engage us.

The application of the theory, it’s unforeseen results and the perils and pitfalls of gambling and greed are too intangible to make an impression. Post-interval, the drama picks up, but too many random card games featuring too many cameos — from Ajay Devgn to Jackie Shroff and Shakti Kapoor to Saira Mohan — fail to add value to this already lost hand. There’s even a bromance brewing somewhere, but by then you really don’t care.

Even the performances fail to make an impression. The young guns turn in performances ranging from the amateurish to the irritating, with the exception of star kid Shraddha (Shakti) Kapoor who does show some promise. Madhavan’s sketchily-written character lets him down while Raima Sen is saddled with a two-scene role. Predictably, Bachchan rescues the film in parts, but his portrayal of the absent-minded and eccentric prof is also too predictable. Launching into a monologue or chewing up half his words or the hyper-gesticulation, there is nothing in Venkat Subramaniam that we haven’t seen before in Black’s Debraj Sahai or The Last Lear’s Harish Mishra.

It is only Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography and Salim-Sulaiman’s score, especially the bare-back feast Neeyat —the Brazilian bombshell in question is Maria Gomez — that lifts Teen Patti.

But the biggest letdown of Teen Patti? The Bachchan-Ben Kingsley interactions. Yadav has the to-die-for chance of getting two acting stalwarts in the same frame, but she squanders it abysmally. Exchanging notes across a table or talking a walk on the Cambridge lawns, there is no crisp dialogue, no superstar chemistry, no power play between Big B and Sir B. What makes it worse? Kingsley speaking in the all-too-familiar voice of Boman Irani!

Play at your own risk.


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