Hindi
‘Entertainment’…This one is for kids and likeminded!
MUMBAI: A dog rates as the most accepted and loved pet anywhere and everywhere. They are easily adaptable to training and loyal as companions. The pet and the owner have a tendency to get emotionally attached to each other, so much so that fortunes are sometimes willed to a pet on the owner’s death.
Dogs are often used in films too, usually with the aim to entertain children or, otherwise, to solve mysteries. Entertainment seems to have been inspired from an American film, Bailey’s Billion$, a children’s film about a pet dog inheriting a billion dollar and the deceased’s nephew and spouse wanting to eliminate him for the billion to pass on to them.
Akshay Kumar is a devoted son who has no regular job. To tend to his ailing father lying in hospital, he keeps doing various odd jobs every day. Every time he does an odd job, he is shortchanged but he avoids getting into a fight as his priority is to run to hospital to check on his father, Darshan Jariwal.
On one such visit to the hospital with his friend to check on his father, he learns that Jariwala is not sick at all and just exploiting Akshay to enjoy the luxury of the five-star hospital and is romancing a nurse. When confronted, Jariwala reveals that Akshay is not his son but he adopted him after a train accident in which his mother had died and the compensation to her close relatives was Rs one lakh which he wanted to claim. Akshay is actually the son of a wealthy jeweller (played by Dalip Tahil as a photo frame) from Bangkok who sired him and later betrayed his mother.
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Directors: Sajid-Farhad. Cast: Akshay Kumar, Tamannaah ,MIthun Chakraborty, Johny Liver, Prakash Raj, Sonu Sood, Krishna Abhishek, Darshan Jariwala and, in cameo, Riteish Deshmukh. |
Producers: Ramesh S Taurani, Jayantilal Gada.
Just when Akshay learns of this history about his family, he happens to watch a TV news bulletin and learns that his biological father has passed away. Akshay is thrilled and decides to go to Bangkok along with his sidekick, Krishna, to claim his father’s fortune. On his arrival at his late father’s palatial mansion, he meets Johny Lever, the family lawyer and executor of the will. Lever does not take much convincing to accept Akshay as the jeweller’s son. However, Akshay can’t inherit the Rs 3000 crore fortune since his dead father has bestowed all of it to his pet dog named Entertainment!
Akshay thinks nothing of it and decides that all he has to do is to get rid of the pet and, as the son of the deceased Tahil, he will be the next heir. Meanwhile, two jailbirds, Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood, also claimants to Tahil’s fortune, are just out and proceed to claim it. But they realise that there are two other heirs before them, a dog and Akshay. They realise that Akshy plans to kill the dog so all they have to do is wait till that happens after which they can kill Akshay.
This is one smart dog who has saved Tahil from Prakash and Sood and outsmarts Akshay every time he tries to kill him. On one such attempt to kill the pet, it is Akshay whose life is in danger; the pet saves him. Akshay has a change of heart. Now he accepts the pet as the true inheritor of Tahil’s fortune and decides to leave Bangkok. But, not for long since he knows that the pet’s life is in danger.
Now the battle of wits is between Akshay, Krishna and the pet on one side and Sood and Prakash on the other.
Since this is supposed to be a light entertainer, aiming more towards kids, wittingly or unwittingly, the treatment is of the sort one would find in the Hollywood hit Home Alone. Not only the theme but also a lot of things are borrowed from earlier films: the pet’s tricks for instance are sourced from the movie Kung Fu Hustle and Akshay describing ghosts to Prakash and Sood is from Mahmood’s famous scene from classic hit, Pyar Kiye Jaa. Little is original—except for the best part of the film, which is Krishna’s linking and rhyming various film titles to convey whatever he wants; that is funny. Songs are pleasant and peppy but used randomly whatever the situation. While their direction is okay with ample help from other sources, dialogue on which Sajid and Farhad have built their career is a notch below their standard except for Krishna’s lines. The second half needed some trimming.
While the dog Junior is expectedly the mainstay of the film, Krishna and Johny Lever’s parts add to the fun quotient. Akshay is his normal self: funny at times, almost so at others. Prakash and Sood as blundering villains are apt for a film aimed at children. Tamannaah is kept away for most of the first half while she does get due exposure in the latter part.
Entertainment is a fairly amusing film which the children will enjoy. However, with cinema chains blocked for the next week’s release, Singham Returns, this film has limited time to recover whatever it can.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
