Ladies and gentleman, now to present our next award for “The most disappointing piece of crap of the year” we don’t even need the nominees. The winner is… Kambakkht Ishq!
Congratulations!!!
The director wanted the actors to ‘feel the love’ but all the constant bickering and supposed fights make the viewer feel constipated, agitated, suffocated (well, you get the picture) and begging for the movie to end. I tried hard but alas! I couldn’t ‘feel the love’ anywhere. Then again my spectacles might not have been clean enough to see through the façade.
Plot:
Wait… there was one?? I must have slept through it, because all I could see was a whole lot of gimmicks. Viraaj (Akshay Kumar) is a Hollywood stuntman and India’s answer to Hugh Hefner (ummm… wasn’t that Hey Baby?). He realises that his brother Lucky (Aftab Shivdasani) is getting married to Kamini (Amrita Arora) and he must do everything in his power to stop this catastrophe because apparently ‘women are good for only two things’. But wait, there’s more: Enter Kareena Kapoor a.k.a. Bebo a.k.a. Simrita a.k.a. surgeon cum supermodel (even I was confused). So there you have it – the misogynist meets the man – hater. The battle lines are drawn. The only drawback is that the viewer couldn’t care less. So we travel through the beautiful locales of Venice, Rome, Paris and L.A. and ‘fate’ keeps bumping these two into each other. Expect no fireworks though because ‘all men are dogs’ and the ‘hottest’ girl in town is a ‘b**ch’. But don’t you worry Mr. hot hunk, because when the chips are down and the ‘hot’ girl has had a little too much to drink she will fall into your arms. Why? Well, because Mr. hot hunk is so full of oomph that the girl felt intimidated by his sexuality and therefore wanted to stay away from him. But now, with all the drinks, she is blurting her most intimate desires like a babbling idiot and she doesn’t care in the least that Mr. hot hunk thinks that all women are playthings because in her heart she knows that he is not like that. Whoah! What logic! Clap, clap, and clap! Of course, it depends whether the viewer has chosen to sit through all that drudgery.
The Good:
Just so that the director could salvage some pride. There is a great ensemble cast (we’ll leave out the fact that all of them were completely wasted); but on a serious note where else would you find Sylvester Stallone, Brandon Routh, Denise Richards and all sharing screen space with Kareena, Akshay and Aftab? Throw in the cameos of Boman Irani (as a doctor who is hard of hearing and takes double meaning to whole new level) and Javed Jaffrey (playing a ‘suer’. I am hardly being derogatory. Suer being the one who sues at every opportunity) plus Kirron Kher (playing the oh so stereotypical aunty cum mother) and you have a bhelpuri which is completely unique. It is a pity that these actors couldn’t be better utilized. The Om Mangalam song stands out due to its catchy music. Also Akshay’s reaction to the tune of Om Mangalam just after the interval is probably the best part of the movie. For a movie which has got not much going for it the editing is surprisingly good. The length is just over 2hrs (what a relief!). The action scenes and picturesque locations are well done. I can only wonder what the result could have been if the focus would not have been the gimmickry.
The Bad:
Oh where should I begin? There was a lot of loud acting. Battle of the sexes has been portrayed with panache in so many movies. Most notably in When Harry Met Sally (Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) and recently in What happens in Vegas (Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz). Why look towards Hollywood? Even our Hum Tum (Saif and Rani) was a class apart. One doesn’t need to hurl abuses at each other to portray such an evergreen theme. We criticize Hollywood for stereotyping our Hindi film industry and there was a whole lot of hullabaloo over Slumdog but this? This film has been made by our very own blood and it depicts Hollywood full of bikini clad babes and ‘loose’ character women. All Denise Richards cares about is getting married and making ‘golden babies’. Really? Move over, man. There is absolutely no chemistry between Akshay and Kareena (maybe if they had tried to portray a gradual change of heart it would have looked much better) but both of them look totally thanda on screen. Akshay seems to have the Punjabi dude hangover and Kareena looks as if she can’t get over the ‘look I am so sexy’ phase. Seriously, the person who spent his money to sleep in an AC room is the only one who made a wise investment by going in to see this one.
The Bakwaas:
Special segment, especially for this film which is inspired by the line: “You want to see how low a stuntman can get”. This segment is just showing how low our directors can get. This film would probably serve best as a propaganda for ‘hate women campaign’. Women are toys. Sc**w them and move on. What happened to “when a woman says no, it means NO?” Sylvester Stallone is limited to a fight scene and a 30 second speech. Denise looked like she was in a hurry to get old! (If it wasn’t for Wild Things I would have given up on her after seeing this movie). If this qualifies as entertainment then I really feel sad. Society really has become so masochistic and sadistic (if we go by what this film proclaims). Javed Jaffrey is limited to toilet humour that doesn’t go down the flush. Amrita Arora plays the dumb bimbette at which she excels. Kirron Kher is just ‘there’. We have seen it in Om Shanti Om, Dostana and now this. Talk about typecasting. Boman Irani does try to lift the mood but it’s too little too late.
The film qualifies in one word for which I had to painfully pen down such a long review: Bakwaas!!But from what I’ve heard it seems to be doing well at the box office. The world works in funny ways! This one is undoubtedly one for the trash can. For me, it really was Kambakkht Bakwaas!!