A review I wish I didn’t have to
write. Yash Chopra’s swansong with Shahrukh Khan in the lead totally failed to impress
me.
Shahrukh Khan is Samar Anand. In
his twenties, Samar charms Meera (played by Katrina Kaif) in London. Though the year is 2002, Samar dances in
railway stations with huge Olympic symbols behind him. Meera is the kind of person
who makes deals with God and when Samar has an accident, she makes one with God.
She promises to leave Samar if he were to recover. This is I find really hard
to buy, considering that Meera smokes, swears, wears designer clothes and lives
in modern London. Meera’s desertion makes Samar a loner and he ends up as a
bomb disposal expert in the Indian Army. Enters tomboy Akira (Anushka Sharma),
a reporter with Discovery channel who finds Samar’s diary by accident. From here in the second half the movie really
goes downhill. It requires an enormous
amount of patience to sit through the last hour of the movie (I was constantly
thinking of going home so that I could keep the promise I made to my daughter
to do some quilling with her)
The man who made movies like the classic
Lamhe, Chandni, Deewar and so on constantly treads on a wafer thin plot, which I think is the movie’s main
flaw. The music by A R Rahman is also a disappointment. Further, there are no
heroines in chiffon sarees dancing in Switzerland, a Yash Chopra hallmark .
Some things, I guess, are not meant to be.
The positives would include
firstly the romance itself that Yash Chopra brings to the movie. It is hard to
believe that this movie is directed by an eighty year old man and it is hard not to
be inspired by his belief in love and romance. Shahrukh Khan’s sad, angry, loner
performance as Major Samar Anand was good to watch. Anushka Sharma proves once
again that she is one of the best actresses we have when it comes to ‘acting’. Katrina
Kaif appeared wooden in most scenes. I think she was mostly restricted by the
script itself. Both the heroines were able to be the typical Yash Chopra lead ladies- stunning, intelligent and graceful. It is also a delight to
watch the ever so beautiful London and Ladakh/Kashmir once again.
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