But at least there's a poise to it all-even moments of wackiness feel true to the characters and don't descend into silliness. Or, rather, "purportedly comically awry." It's fine that there's nothing laugh-out-loud in what's intended to be a wry and poignant look at an earnest immigrant honorably trying to find his place in a land where, y'know, "Everybody's got a dream." But in addition to an uninspired script, The Tiger Hunter suffers from a director who doesn't seem comfortable in comedy-or at least demonstrates no real feel for it here. With the help of Babu and a work friend (Jon Heder), Sami tries to put up a front that, of course, goes comically awry. Adding to the pressure, Ruby and her rigidly old-school father, General Iqbal, are touring the country, meeting prospective suitors for an arranged marriage. Relegated to a temporary job as a basement-dwelling draftsman, Sami needs to impress the higher-ups if he's going to land a permanent position in order to stay in the U.S. In those crammed quarters, the cast is a comically close-call ballet of ducking and weaving, with Parvesh Cheena ("My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend") giving a particularly fine turn with just a few words. Things don't work out as planned, and Sami finds himself rooming with eternally sunny Pakistani immigrant Babu (the terrific Rizwan Manji) and Babu's menagerie of about a dozen fellow immigrant engineers who cobble together the rent. Later, when Sami's on his way to a job fair, the song used behind that slo-mo walk croons, "He's mover and a shaker / straight to the top."
"America / hard-workin' people / Everybody's got a dream" go the lyrics-I kid you not. It begins none too promisingly, with the first of multiple slow-motion walking scenes with songs so on-the-nose it smashes our nasal septa. Once we get over the bump of wondering how a company, even at that time, could expect someone to fly halfway around the world at his own expense simply for the prospect of a job, we shift to the American portion of our program. When Sami receives a letter from a Chicago company offering to hire him, the townsfolk all chip it to pay for his plane ticket. Amid copious flashbacks to Sami with his childhood sweetheart Ruby (Manya Chopra as a child, Karen David as an adult) and his father (Kay Kay Menon), we're subjected to hammering voiceovers describing what we're seeing, and such dialogue as "To be a great tiger hunter, you must become the tiger." "Community" star Pudi, who is also one of the executive producers, plays Sami Malik, a newly minted electrical engineer in 1979 rural India, whose late father was a beloved local tiger hunter-not in the trophy sense but in the "There's a tiger prowling around our village who mauled a kid" sense. in the 1960s-Khan and co-writer Sameer Gardezi don't exhibit a visceral feel for the material, softening the characters' travails to a point where little matters as they mark time till the inevitable feel-good finale. Despite her own family experience-the lead character is based very loosely on her immigrant father, who came to the U.S. Yet a formulaic arc, an overreliance on bludgeoning voiceovers and a parade of syrupy bromides show a filmmaker in need of growth and seasoning. It also opens with fluid camerawork and a set-piece that sincerely captures the surreal joy of classic Bollywood musical numbers, without winking or becoming a self-parody.
Dignified work by star Danny Pudi and some nicely low-key clowning by a troupe of largely Indian-American supporting players can do little to rescue this by-the-numbers seriocomedy about an immigrant chasing his dreams.Ī first feature by director and co-writer Lena Khan, a UCLA film-school grad, The Tiger Hunter boasts effective pacing and good control of a large cast in often small spaces.