Starring legendary actors Amitabh Bachchan and Ben Kingsley, and directed by Leena Yadav (whose movies have premiered at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival), Teen Patti is about a mathematics experiment that ends in chaos, death and repentance.
The movie is about an Indian mathematician, Venkat Subramaniam (Amitabh Bachchan), who is invited to the University of Cambridge by Perci Trachtenberg (Ben Kingsley), whereupon he recounts his life as a Mathematics Professor in an unnamed Indian college, his theory of probability and his success playing card games. Venkat tests his equation to crack Teen Patti (an Indian card game derived from poker) at the addas (underground gaming dens) of wild Bombay, with the help of a few students and a colleague. But what started out as a naive experiment becomes a game of blackmail and greed that is both uncontrollable and inescapable.
The movie's inspiration comes from the same place as 21 (2008), one of the classic movies featuring casino games, where brilliant college students came together to win big money. While 21 takes place in the casinos of Las Vegas, Teen Patti mostly takes place in the underground gaming addas (dens) of Mumbai. The movie never shows anything exact about the probability theory that helps them rake in millions of rupees, however this was a deliberate move by the part of the director as she wanted the movie to be a metaphor and exploration of human nature, and the movie is quite justified to that extent.
Teen Patti masterfully tracks the moral degradation of persons involved in the experiment except for the protagonist, who is the only one not corrupted by greed. Blinded by greed, and the glamour of gaming, the persons involved start assuming the assigned persona they were only supposed to act. The soundtrack flawlessly complements this moral decline, as individuals start suspecting each other of stealing and blackmailing. Numerous attempts by Venkat to stop the experiment getting out of control end in violence, and finally, the death of one of the students. The movie is a drama thriller and the audience is kept on the edge of their seats till the very end.
Another element that makes the movie brilliant is its amazing cast. Apart from exemplary acting skills of Bachchan and Kingsley, the veteran actor R. Madhavan and newcomers, Shraddha Kapoor, Dhruv Ganesh and Siddarth Kher, are a treat to watch. In spite of such an amazing cast and soundtrack, the movie is not without its flaws. The screenplay and editing make the film unnecessarily longer than it needs to be. Moreover, the realistic movie sets are contradicted by the flaw in logic at various places. Some dialogue is so incoherent that it invokes laughter rather than the awe it was originally meant to produce. The college authorities, who are shown as extremely strict and interfering, have no idea about the experiment, weapons and money being tossed around in the college campus. The hand signals used by the players are absolutely gibberish and would never work in real life.
Another major problem is the ending of the movie. The only one who gets punished for the experiment going awry is the faultless mathematician, and his punishment only amounts to losing a job where he and his brilliance were unrecognized and unacknowledged. In the final scenes, he is awarded the highest academic honour by the University of Cambridge for his theory of probability that he had forsaken. The ending is too simplistic, with no real consequences or rationale for what has occurred throughout the movie.
All in all, Teen Patti, with its intriguing concept and an exceptional cast, could've been one of a kind but instead leaves the audience longing for more clarity. As a modern movie, during an age where content is king, Teen Patti sadly disappoints at various level. Nonetheless, it's a good watch if you like to watch two acting geniuses (yes, I definitely mean Ben Kingsley and Amitabh Bachchan) sharing the screen and some meaningful philosophical crosstalk.
TEEN PATTI OFFICIAL MOVIE TRAILER
