Masand's verdict: Outsourced, string of rusty jokes

PREDICTABLE: Outsourced revisits all the usual cliches you'd expect in cross-cultural comedies.

ibnlive.com is on mobile now. Read news, watch videos
be a Citizen Journalist. Log on to m.ibnlive.com NOW!

Related Stories

Top Headlines

Top Videos

Most Popular

• Politicians play coy; avoid debate on gay sex 

• Serena wins Wimbledon women's singles title | Match in pics 

• Speeding bus falls on Howrah rail tracks, 10 dead 

• Heavy rains throw Mumbai out of gear 

• 6 sharpshooters of Chhota Shakeel held in Delhi: cops 

• New swine flu case takes India's tally to 129 

• Goodbye to Mumbai slums, child star moves into flat 

• Cops accused of killing man to win medals | Watch 

• Maid insists Shiney raped her: women's panel chief 

• Exhume bodies of Shopian women in Kashmir: High Court 

• Railways fail to provide basic facilities to passengers 

• Budget on Campus: Young India's expectations from FM 

• Speeding bus falls on Howrah rail tracks, 10 dead 

• Politicians play coy; avoid debate on gay sex 

• Watch: Cops shoot man to win medals 

• MJ to be buried in style in a 14-carat casket 

• Surviving The City: Moving ahead despite Necrosis 

• Politicians play coy; avoid debate on gay sex 

• Axe the Tax: CNN-IBN takes public tax complaints to FM 

• CJ appeals for help to find missing daughter 

• Second nursing student alleges Andhra MLA raped her 

• Maid insists Shiney raped her: women's panel chief 

• CM helpless, admits Maoists extort Rs 300 cr annually 

• Bus falls on rail tracks in Kolkata, 8 killed 

• Cops accused of killing man to win medals 

• Exhume bodies of Shopian women in Kashmir: High Court 

• Goodbye to Mumbai slums, child star moves into flat 

• Politicians play coy; avoid debate on gay sex 

• 10 years of Kargil, heroes recall the war 

• Serena wins Wimbledon women's singles title 

Photogallery

Find us on Facebook | Join IBNLive community

Stay ahead with G-Talk Buddy | Click now!

Cast: Josh Hamilton, Ayesha Dharker

Director: John Jeffcoat

In Outsourced, which also opens at the multiplexes this weekend, things couldn't be going any worse for Seattle yuppie Todd Anderson (played by Josh Hamilton) when his job managing a call centre for novelty products is outsourced to India, and he must travel there to train his replacement.

Your standard fish-out-of-water story, with jokes on everything from straying cows to street food-led-diarrhoea, the film revisits all the usual clichés you've come to expect in cross-cultural comedies like these.

Expectedly then, the typically insensitive American desperate to find a cheeseburger in a small town gets his symbolic baptism on Holi when he's doused with colour and wades into a pond only to come out enlightened about embracing his new surroundings, and in love with a cute co-worker.

Like most films cut from the same cloth, Outsourced, too, beneath all its shameless Indian typecasting, is intended as a celebration of cultural diversity, and an affirmation that despite differences in race and religion, all people are essentially the same. It's a predictable message and it's arrived at predictably - after presenting a catalogue of stereotypes on both sides of the India-America divide which feeds the farce.

About the only merit in this film is the sincerity Ayesha Dharker applies to her character of the earnest call centre employee who hooks up with Anderson and inspires him to reconsider his workaholic life.

That apart, Outsourced is a string of rusty old jokes that aren't all that funny anymore.

I'm going with two out of five for Outsourced; it's a film in which everything ends as expected, just not soon enough. Watch it, but only if you have nothing better to do.

Rating: 2 / 5 (Average)