Mar 17, 2016 09:26 PM
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A tragicomedy in two acts: tragedy while it lasts, comedy and relief when it ends.
Another serving of stale, tasteless broth from the soup kitchens of Bollywood: bad, homeless writers take heart – for one day even the mangiest of your screenplays shall find a cozy shelter here. Just keep up the lousy writing.
Released on Valentine’s Day this is a wannabe love story that spans one heart, one-and-a-half continents(the Indian subcontinent and the North American continent, ) a double role of Yami Gautum; and a threesome of Pulkit Samrat, the pining lover, Yami Gautum, as herself and her twin cousin(d-uh?), and the sultry and sizzling, buxom and busty, rich and ravishing, and divorced and desolate Urvashi Rautela.
The movie is shot mostly in Shimla: an idyllic place with endless pageants of candy floss clowns, marching pipe bands, vintage sage-red jalopies dashing fore and aft amidst columns of swirling CGI snow dust, rippling lake waters, and blue snow-clad mountains tipped with silver sunlight. And ramshackle hovels planted like stakes to shame the pristine landscape.
Pulkit leaves his home, ailing grandpa and his photo studio, and childhood crush Yami to study in the town. Much later, on the brink of getting fired from his insipid white-collar job, he takes on the challenge of securing a vital contract from a rival company run by none other than his ex-CEO’s divorced wife, Urvashi Rautela, to save his job as well as the company.
The hand of god brings the threesome together in a Yoga Camp in faraway Canada with landscape as barren as the moon. Less of a fitness camp, it seems to be a matchmaking enterprise where, with the Guruji severely indisposed with constipation, his fat disciple, Bharti Singh, like an apatetic winged archer, takes over to deliver sermons on love and erotica, bringing together at least one straight and one gay couple by the time the camp with its bizarre rituals of mass canoodling ends.
Young, divorced, billionaire, busty, beautiful women seem as easy to seduce as a hungry dog that drools after the juicy bone in your lap. Cozy in the embrace of his two ladyloves, conscience suddenly strikes Pulkit like a bolt from the cloudless blue, and leaving his corporate ambitions languishing by the wayside, he embarks on a search for his school heartthrob. The real Yami, when found, scorns his overtures after revealing she has a heart condition, but yields finally to his cloying, hot embraces. The rest, as they say, is about batty sacrifices made at the altar of delirious love.
The story meanders like a lazy cow grazing in the meadows; the dialogues inane witless exchanges of rags and woolly dolls; and hairstyles and school-dresses the stuff nightmares of the bon vivant are made of.
The stale jokes in the movie, cracked mostly by Babyji ‘who rocks, ’ are about as funny as a cancer ad.
The director keeps toying with various endings and then finally settles on the most ludicrous one. Only, instead of editing out his options he keeps all of them and each time you spit in your hands and grip the sidebars of your seat to heave-ho, he twists the plot, getting you a bit more bang for your bucks.
This movie needs to be quickly consigned to the catacombs of manmade disasters and obliterated from human memory as a terrible joke. My heart goes out to the honest blokes out there who’ve shelled out the 26-odd crores this movie has totted up in lifetime earnings.
