Thank You

About the film

Thank You is a 2011 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy film written and directed by Anees Bazmee and produced jointly by Ronnie Screwvala and Twinkle Khanna under UTV Motion Pictures. The film stars Akshay Kumar, Bobby Deol, Suniel Shetty, Irrfan Khan, Sonam Kapoor, Rimi Sen and Celina Jaitly. Ranjeet, Mukesh Tiwari, Rakhee Tandon, Smita Jaykar, and Chahat Khanna are featured in supporting roles with Mallika Sherawat and Vidya Balan in special appearances.

Released on 8 April 2011, and conceptually similar to Bazmee's No Entry (2005), Thank You revolves around three married men and best friends at work who engage in philandering behaviour and run a yacht business, trying to have some fun outside their marriage. However, when suspicion plays its cards right on their wives, enlisted for help arrives private investigator Kishan Khurana, a detective who specializes in extramarital relationships. However, the course of events that follows Kishan's attempts to expose and reform the men takes twists and turns that are hard for him to deal with, and what follows suit forms the rest of the story. Most of the scenes in this film were shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Toronto, Ontario in Canada.

Plot

Raj Malhotra, Vikram Chopra and Yogi Mathur are best friends who, as partners, own the Virgin Yacht Company in Toronto, and are all philanderers by nature. Their respective wives Sanjana Arora Malhotra, Shivani Chopra and Maya Mathur are also similarly best friends. While Raj and Vikram successfully get away with their flirtatious behaviour and remain loyal in the books of their seemingly unsuspecting wives, Yogi is known to have begun failing recently because of Maya's secret best friend who exposed him to her.

One day, as Sanjana bumps into Maya, she soon discovers that Raj might be lying to her; as they catch up with Shivani, she deduces that Raj is having an affair, while also suspecting that Vikram could follow in these footsteps, little aware that he is the unofficial "mastermind" of the trio. Maya then suggests to Sanjana that she meet Kishan, whom Shivani also seems to know. Kishan is revealed to be a private detective specializing in extramarital affairs, whose initial brushoff with Sanjana leads her to question his sensibilities until Maya points out he must have dug up dirt on Raj. Sanjana leaves unconvinced by Kishan's explanation, but he is determined to prove his point. At the New Year's Eve party, he summons all of Raj's girlfriends and nearly has him exposed to Sanjana, but Vikram steps in to save the day for Raj by convincing Yogi to play along.

Realizing someone is onto Raj, Vikram reaches out to his intelligence officer friend K.D., who declines to help but suggests hiring a private investigator. As fate would have it, they end up at Kishan's office, and recognize him from the party, completely unaware of his identity as Sanjana's informer. He offers to help them find the buster who assisted Sanjana, in reality intending to play a double game. He secretly records Yogi's confession to Sanjana about his affairs and doctors the audio with help from a voiceover artist, later showing the altered video to Raj and Vikram, who sabotage Yogi's hotel date with a woman named Sweety, who is to married soon, by tipping Maya; in the expose that follows, Yogi is flustered to find Raj and Vikram betrayed him. Later that evening, Kishan finally has Raj exposed through media stories of him meeting with another woman who was in fact set up by Kishan, along with her husband, to trap Raj in the fiasco; an on-the-run Raj later calls Vikram to a waterside spot the next morning, when Vikram finally comes up with an idea to project him as an undercover officer on a mission to destroy the dreaded criminal King, whose brother was recently killed — a feat attributed to Raj as part of the ploy. Sanjana ends up buying the story and forgives him, later snubbing Kishan over the exposé. Determined to prove his point, Kishan swears to find out the tr…

Production

Sonam Kapoor replaced Katrina Kaif as the lead actress, since Bazmee wanted to have a change with Kumar's love interest. The film was shot at different locations in Vancouver, Toronto and Bangkok. It was made on a budget of ₹ 500 million, while an additional amount of ₹ 80 million was spent on promotions.

Thank You marked the final film for Vikas Bahl as creative producer for UTV; he quit production duties at UTV to debut as a writer and director with the UTV Spotboy film Chillar Party later in 2011.

Reception

Though earning more than INR 1 billion and emerging as a commercial success, Thank You opened to negative reviews from critics. Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama rated the film with 2/5 Stars saying, "What could've been an honest take on dishonesty fails to leave a mark eventually". Rajeev Masand of CNN-IBN gave the film one star and stated, "Badly scripted, shoddily photographed and embarrassingly performed, Thank You is one of those rare films that gets absolutely nothing right." Anupama Chopra of NDTV gave one and a half stars and commented, "My brains were battered to pulp and my eardrums are still recovering from Pritam's cacophonous sound-track." Nikhat Kazmi of the Times of India awarded two and a half stars saying, "You have a film that can be an average weekend getaway. Nothing more, not even Mallika Sherawat's item number."

Key details