• 

  Manisha Lakhe

  Read full review Hide full review

  

  0

  

  0

You know when you depend on the one-act-repeat man Omi Vaidya to be the ‘Sootradhaar’ or the Narrator who is going to manipulate the plot of your movie forward, then you also know that the threads of th …

You know when you depend on the one-act-repeat man Omi Vaidya to be the ‘Sootradhaar’ or the Narrator who is going to manipulate the plot of your movie forward, then you also know that the threads of the story are going to end up like a noose, strangulating the very life of your movie.

Well, Omi Vaidya does work inordinately hard towards mauling the corpse of the idea for the movie, but cannot be held responsible for the death of the movie itself. There are others that need to stand in front of the firing squad first.



Where are the directors and the producers who demand that their heroes and heroines look the part? They are supposed to provide a fantasy, an aspiration to alleviate the pathetic day to day existence of the audience, isn’t it? Then why is hero in oversized plaid shirts and knickerbocker pants? Why do the directors believe his girth is not going to be questioned at all? Especially when he’s trying so damned hard to ‘act’ young. The fear of the hero toppling over and hurting himself when he jumps in the air and clicks his heels is so palpable you miss out on the explanation that ‘Horny’ is what he calls his car. In case you do end up spending your hard earned money on this movie, I would suggest you go back and watch Madhavan the Mani Ratnam version of Amores Perros: Aaytha Ezhuthu or Yuva. If that is too old for you, watch him in Tanu Weds Manu. He’s as good in these movies as he’s bad here. Not his fault. Someone must have asked him to grow that piece of carpet under his chin which changes size with every costume change that the heroine goes through.

The heroine is Bipasha Basu, who you must admit has never been a delicate darling. Here she looks gorgeous in some scenes and in desperate need of lipo in others. True, her statuesque beauty is not everyone’s cup of tea, but someone needed to stop showing her working on living a healthy life. (And yes, they missed out on a marketing tie-up with the healthy juices she peddles on tv.) Her role is limited to raising her head in laughter and tearing tissue napkins to prove a point.



The essential group of friends is so sketchily and hastily put together, their job is add to more cliches: ‘Heart shape is incorrectly names, it looks more like a bum’. When you are sitting through such ‘friendly, happy funny’ conversations, you wish to take your heel to someone’s posterior all right. And when you are imagining that action sequence, you hear the hero explain, ‘My first crush was Rasna Orange Crush’

Speaking of crushes, there is Helen in the movie. The girl who sang Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo and gave hip shakes a name: Mehbooba Mehbooba (in Sholay), is Granny. And when you see her in that horrid silvery grey wig, you have new respect for the late Dev Anand who did not want us to remember him as the Dev Anand on his deathbed but hopes that we would remember him as Dev Anand of Hum Dono.



The movie has a break up gone wrong, a righting of that wrong, and excruciating irrelevant things in between. Not even Milind Soman alighting from a helicopter and the movie shifting to Greece can help stop you from sinking lower and lower in the seat. You begin to notice that hard work has gone into the women’s hair styling. Elaborate curls and plaits and chignons. ‘Maybe the hair stylist Hazra Sheikh was the only one who got paid,’ said one kind soul.



One section of the audience was laughing at the, ‘I want my Horny back’ kind of jokes had fallen silent by the end of the movie. The Japanese have long advocated a brilliant though melodramatic end. It’s called Hara Kiri, Seppuku or stomach cutting... The lip-synched songs (there are many) in this film could promote that tradition among the audience today. When a largish portion of the audience is no more, then maybe we won’t be subjected to this kind of humiliation week after week.