Director: Parambrata Chattopadhyay
Cast: Emona Enabulu, Parambrata Chattopadhyay
You almost wish Tiki Taka were made and marketed as a full-blown sarcastic satire on the lines of a Borat, that was labelled as a ‘mockumentary’ on its release. The ingredients are all there. The main protagonist here is a Senegalese man named Kelechi (Emona Enabulu), who’s essentially a drug mule, but gets labelled as a pro footballer once he lands in Kolkata. Ardent football followers would know the craze and hype around African footballers joining Bengali football clubs. Tiki Taka’s ambition lies in milking the circus around these announcements and creating a fun, caper film out of this milieu.
Unfortunately, though the director’s vision in creating such a film is obvious, the film’s downfall lies in how it suddenly starts taking itself too seriously. Satires turn into clichés and jokes start falling squarely back on the script itself. Not to mention, some of these ‘jokes’ are pretty distasteful and unparliamentary even for a film that sells itself as a full blown comedy.
The core plot itself is a simple one. Kelechi lands in India with illegal drugs stashed inside a football, with orders to wait for a pick up at the airport. In a classic case of mistaken identity, the wrong person gets picked up instead, leaving Kelechi stranded in an alien country. He finds help in the form of a taxi driver Raju (played by the director Parambrata himself), who helps him locate his intended host, a dangerous local druglord named PK (Saswata Chatterjee).
One thing leads to another and Kelechi ends up being unable to complete his delivery to PK. He needs the money to fund a return ticket, and also a surgery for his ailing mother back home. This is where the film gets preposterous. Raju whips up an idea to help Kelechi out of the rut. He decides to propagate a lie that Kelechi is a pro footballer, who’s just finished an assignment playing at the Youth World Cup. He hopes this would entice one of the two rival city clubs to offer him a footballing contract to play in a big derby game. He enlists the help of a local journalist Bonny (Ritabhari Chakraborty) to help set this in motion.
Kelechi becomes the talk of the town overnight. A simple video of him kicking a ball around with kids at a park goes viral on TV news channels. A bidding war ensues between the two rival clubs. Everyone wants a piece of him now, not just PK. Raju’s plan seems to have worked perfectly, with one small hitch. This is all being accomplished without Kelechi’s knowledge!
The film throws up a disclaimer in between, that 4G didn’t exist during the times in which this story unfolds. But you already know this rider is just clutching at straws. Like I mentioned before, being a football fan myself, I would have laughed out loud at most of these scenes had the film been marketed as a pure satire. From that angle, these scenes are genuinely funny. But this is not the case here, at lease not overtly so. And because of that, you begin pointing out at obvious gaping loopholes in the plot. What happened to basic journalistic fact-checks and stringent background checks run by football clubs even before signing junior level players? To make matters worse, the police are portrayed through a middling comedy track and there’s also a dreary romantic sequence written around Bonny and Kelechi that is shoehorned into the script.
Tiki Taka was originally meant to be a Bengali film with a theatrical release. It’s been adjusted into an OTT Hindi film format and this shows in many scenes where the dubbing sync is missing. More importantly, I also wonder if many of the director’s intended ideas were missed during this digital and linguistic translation. In footballing terms, the phrase Tiki Taka refers to an attractive style of play characterized by short passes and movement to unlock the opposition. But what good is it you wonder, when it only takes you towards scoring an own goal.
Overall rating: 1.5/5
