Short Kut - The Con Is On

ShortKut, originally uploaded by ShortKut - The Con is on.

This is a promo poster of the Bollywood movie "Shortkut - The Con Is On" starring Akshaye Khanna, Arshad Warsi, Amrita Rao, Siddhant Randeria and Chunky Pandey in the main roles.

The story of Short Kut: The Con is On (Shortkut or Short Kut), directed by Neeraj Vora and produced by Anil Kapoor, spins around Shekhar (Akshaye Khanna), a promising, talented assistant director who dreams about becoming a top, independent writer-director. He lives in a Mumbai chawl (slum), and all the slum-dwellers including the owner Kantibhai (Siddhant Randeria) like him. The successful actress Mansi (Amrita Rao) and Shekhar are in love, but her parents, who wants to eke out every penny out of her celebrity status as a superstar oppose their marriage.

In the meanwhile Shekhar writes a script that can skyrocket his career. His friend and untalented struggling actor Raju (Arshad Warsi) comes to him for shelter as he is thrown out by his landlord from his rented house. Raju comes across a producer who is ready to cast him as a hero if he is able to get for him a good script.

Shekhar too finds a producer who is ready to make a film based on his script and even pays him the signing amount. But Shekhar is heart-broken when he understands that the script of his golden dream project is missing or stolen.

The unscrupulous and opportunistic Raju steals Shekhar’s script and sells it to his producer Tolani (Tiku Talsania). Tolani hires for Raju (to make up for his missing histrionic talents) the services of Guru Kapoor (Chunky Pandey) to give him acting training. But the con Raju convinces Guru Kapoor to become his business manager also.

During the trial show of Raju’s film, Shekhar understands that his script was stolen by Raju and he threatens to sue producer Tolani, who tells him that he had heavy losses in all his previous flop films and begs him not to file a case. Shekhar agrees with him, though he is the real loser.

The super heroine Mansi walks out of her greedy parents’ home and marries Shekhar, who is unable to write anything after being conned by Raju. Shekhar’s frustrations and problems affect their family life, as sometimes, he unleashes his hard feelings on Mansi, who had to leave Shekhar.

In the meanwhile Raju becomes a superstar following the huge success of his debut film. But the chawl owner and his neighbors are with Shekhar and he decides to teach Raju, now King Kumar, a lesson, which is the rest of the film, and how he wins back Mansi.

Short Kut: The Con is On is a remake of the hit Malayalam film Udayananu Tharam (2005) starring Mohanlal, Sreenivasan, Meena, Jagathy and Mukesh. The film is ironically about plagiarism in the film industry but it has resemblance to Hollywood movies Bowfinger and Big Fat Liar. Unlike the Malayalam film, something has gone wrong somewhere and Short Kut falls short of expectations the viewers may have on the actors, the director and the rest of the cast and crew.