Taran Adarsh 

Tashan 

Director: Vijay Krishna Acharya
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Sanjay Mishra, Manoj
         Pahwa, Yashpal Sharma
Rating: *½

Hindi movies have undergone a sea-change in terms of content. From crude, been there seen that, done to death kind of movies, to films with substance, the audience tastes have changed over the years. Even though we've have grown up on the staple diet of desi food, we've cultivated a taste for Italian, Chinese, Thai and Mexican cuisine.

The experience with Tashan is like, you enter a posh restaurant, waiting for a sumptuous meal to be served, but what's served on your plate is vada-pau. Tashan takes you back to the 1970s Bollywood, when illogical situations, blood and gore, for no rhyme of reason, were the main ingredients that made the junta break into taalis. Sorry, the formula doesn't work anymore!

Seriously, what was debutante director Vijay Krishna Acharya thinking when he wrote this apology of a script? It's perfectly okay to revisit the classics and pay homage to the masala films of yore, but the new interpretation has to be contemporary, you need to change with the times.

The one thing that you realize after watching Tashan is, no amount of gloss, glam and top notch stars can ever substitute for a riveting script. Great stars, great styling, great songs and great visuals work as long as the script is great.

So what's the verdict then? If you genuinely miss the 'Kamine, main tera khoon pee jaaonga' and 'Bhagwan ke liye mujhe maaf kardo' kind of movies that dominated the 1970s, pick up a DVD of those hits instead. Tashan is regressive cinema with a capital R.