Review: Teen Patti

I had put a big blind bet on Teen Patti right after watching its first trailer. Gutsy and slick, it seemed like it’s going to be, for the lack of a better expression, a Trail. But director Leena Yadav deals some pretty sad cards here; so much so that I folded up, forfeited my bet and almost walked out of the theatre in the middle of the show. Amitabh Bachchan & Ben Kingsley are as important to this film as the joker cards often are to a deck of cards. In brief, Teen Patti is the story of an unrecognised genius - a math professor played by Amitabh Bachchan, his colleague Madhavan and five of their students. Each one of them, driven by his/her own reasons, tries to cash-in on Bachchan’s latest discovery in the area of Probability - which of course finds a convenient application in the card game of Flash – leading to a sordid state of affairs. Making pots of cash playing at the illegal gambling dens in the Mumbai’s underworld, and the equally seedy overworld, the group descends fast and deep into the spiral of g eed (and anger, jealousy, lust); emerging only to exorcise their personal ghosts and provide film with a rather absurd end. Teen Patti, to be fair, is spun around an interesting premise. But branching into too many unruly offshoots, it fails to capitalise on the idea. It spreads itself thin and wide to accommodate the numerous star cameos. Characters saunter in and out of the film without any particular regard to the narrative. From fashion model Saira Mohan to Novelist Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi; they are all doing duties here. The basic plot in itself could have been a good and gripping film had the director chosen not to force insipid and inconsequential subplots into it.

For further: dearcinema.com/review/review-teen-patti