Director: Nikhil Advani, PG, 225mins

Stars: Anil Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Govinda

Nikhil Advani’s follow up to his mega-successful ‘few months to live’ weepie debut Kal Ho Na Ho (Tomorrow is a Maybe)(2003) is a Bollywood ‘homage’ to Love Actually, and it is just as jejune and manipulative as the Richard Curtis original.

The central plot idea is the same but the six interconnected love stories have been ‘Indianised’ as the couple’s lives intertwine with each other from London to Delhi. We meet a horny newly-wed couple who cannot find the privacy to ‘do it’; a wife with amnesia (Vidya Balan) and her dutiful husband (John Abraham); a bachelor (Akshaye Khanna) afraid of commitment; a lonely taxi driver (Govinda) nursing a blonde dream; an ‘item girl’ actress (Priyanka Chopra) who must choose between her career and her man (Salman Khan) and a bored married man (Anil Kapoor) who is tempted to stray.

However, none of these mini-sitcoms manages to be particularly engaging; it is only Kapoor and Chawla, as the mature couple existing in an unexciting marriage, who manage to bring some credibility to the proceedings, and to evoke audience empathy. Fading funny man, turned politician, Govinda as the non-English speaking cabbie, succeeds in raising the odd chuckle. But the (unintentionally) funniest performance is from Salman Khan, who looks perpetually hungover, sports a scary new hair weave and delivers his dialogue with a weird American-‘Hinglish’ accent and a perpetual glass of red wine in his hand.

Advani aims high with his harum-scarum humour but falls flat when he gets preachy about what it means to be an Indian woman and the bigotry surrounding religious intolerance towards Hindu/Muslim intermarriage. This is because the film is essentially an overlong frothy concoction which we know should not be taken seriously. It is an exercise in assaulting the viewer with the excesses of the redefined NRI (‘Non Resident Indian) formula, which now includes a staple NRI subplot, intended to cater to the increasingly lucrative global NRI box office.

Expect over blown emotions, lavish song sequences with lots of colourful saris, shots of touristy London (St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge), views of mystic India (The Taj Mahal), numerous bolly in-jokes, references to classic Hindi chartbusters, which non-fans will not understand. Everyone lives happily ever after, naturally, but after the first hour, the film becomes a repetitive and laborious ‘time-pass’

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