Written and directed by Bejoy Nambiar, Taish adds onto yet another typical Nambiar drama with stylised music, action, colour and cast, but doesn’t justify the plot that it revolves around. Taish, that translates to rage, is shown quite extensively throughout this film, however most of it seems extremely unnecessary.
Taish has been released as a film as well as a six-part series on Zee5 with the latter carrying forward a non-linear narrative, intercutting between present and past timelines. However, the intercut seems quite confusing and full of jargon as though it attempts to keep the audience hooked by using the cliffhanger mechanism, it does barely nothing actually through its writing and makes it look as something that has to be there, but doesn’t need to.
Taish unfolds as a revenge drama, with unnecessarily aggressive people either living with a traumatic past since childhood, or finding stupid excuses to unleash, creating the drama that the film displays, though Bejoy leaves no stones unturned in making it look stylish and extravagant. The show opens up with Sunny (Pulkit Samrat) brawling with a man in a pub in London that leaves him in bits. Later, as the show progresses, we are told why that man got what he went through. The story showcases two kinds of Punjabi families, the gangsters of Southall, speaking in Punjabi while the elite rich on the other hand are full of doctors and scholars who speak English with an accent.
Rohan Kalra (Jim Sarbh), though cool on the outside, is still skeptical in introducing the love of his life Arfa (Kirti Kharbanda) to his parents as he feels that they won’t accept her for she is a Pakistani Muslim. The younger Kalra, Krish (Ankur Rathee) is getting married though the mother tries to hit two targets with one arrow by getting Rohan also to select someone under pressure. Rohan’s charming best friend Sunny (Pulkit Samrat) makes a grand appearance at the wedding festivities and the three of them share some great on-screen camaraderie.
On the other spectrum is Pali (Harshvardhan Rane), a fearless gangster who is in search of his own vendetta. Pali has problems regarding the turf business and comes face to face with the gang boss Kuljinder (Abhimanyu Singh). What makes this battle personal for Pali is the engagement of Kuljinder with his sister-in-law Jahaan (Sanjeeda Sheikh) who is everything to him and hence he takes on the macho, nothing to lose, tough lover character.
However, the stories coincide the night of the party. Rohan’s panic attack due to some “pre-wedding jitters” push Sunny to take revenge on his behalf that creates the rabbit hole in which all of them spiral into which will end badly.
Taish sets out just like any other Nambiar film, with gloomy settings, murky storylines, actors over stars however hear it just fails to hit the mark as none of characters add onto the narrative and the story itself feels flat and superficial. Taish wants to be too many things but it ends up being nothing but a destination wedding gone wrong thanks to taking unwanted steps out of unjustified rage.
The story doesn’t take itself seriously and that adds onto the fact that by the end of it, it loses the chance of making the profound impact that it set out to make. The characters barely go through any arc and they don’t justify their actions at all ending up with a great packaging for a film with it being barren from inside. All three male leads, feel awfully similar as they carry on their journey with the same approach, that of uncalled for rage and personal issues.
There are plenty of conflicts that the film could talk about but they’re brought up and solved with utmost ease. One of them being a conflict between Rohan and his father because of his opposition towards his Pakistani girlfriend, though this particular thing was solved over one dinner conversation, one of the nicer and surprisingly softer scenes from the show.
The beautiful locations, some great performers and even the most stylishly shot sequences of action and drama couldn’t elevate a rather intricate looking but empty revenge drama Taish as it does nothing to make the story believable or it’s characters empathetic.
Now streaming on Zee5.
