2 States is a cross-culture love story that strives to be sweet, funny and emotionally wrenching all at once.
It is occasionally funny and sweet in parts all right, but the family drama at the film’s core has a severely stultified feel.
It tracks the bearable but hardly exhilarating journey of a madly-in-love, culturally dissimilar couple as they make their way from the first stirrings of love to the serious and complex chores that surround betrothal and marriage.
The story crisscrosses the country – from Ahmedabad to Delhi to Chennai and then back to Delhi and finally to Chennai again – as the lovebirds struggle to get their respective families to accept their relationship.
Amid all the to-ing and fro-ing, the narrative trajectory of the now-on, now-off vibes between the pair and their families sinks into dreary monotony.
Debutant director Abhishek Varman’s adaptation of Bhagat’s characteristically facile but dispiritingly popular story is at best a pretty looking film with a likeable young lead pair that thrives on staying within their limitations.