What's with these south Indian remakes? After "Tujhe Meri Kasam" and "Khushi", this is the third remake where boy and girl seem to hate each other till the eleventh hour.
Till then we suffer their puerile, juvenile bitching and bickering played out at an ear-shattering octave.
Like all remakes this one too suffers from a congenital cultural disorder.
The outwardly hip MTV-inspired youngsters on the college campus seem to think in Telugu and speak in a Hindi that looks so outdated as sambar-vada at McDonalds.
The words like 'ulanghan' and 'aakarshan' are so Sanskritised you wonder if the film is trying some inverse snobbery.
But no such luck. The makers of this curious 'idli-chola' lack the basic street wisdom to do anything that goes beyond the requirements of the Tom-Jerry love story.
Raju (Arya Babbar) and Rani (newcomer Shriya Saran) sneer at each other, show a metaphorical finger at one another and throw insults like "I hope you acquire a terminal illness that would make you incapacitated for life."
Nicely brought up kids, no? This is the death wish that Raja begs of god during a visit to the temple.
Much later, he runs back to ask a saffron-clad man. "Can I reverse my death wish?"
But who's listening to these juvenile pleas in this godforsaken land of puerile prayers rendered by infantile players?
The piercingly staccato dialogues convey the corny cockiness of youngsters reared in the backrooms of a bordello.
Though the film largely steers away from verbal vulgarity it does unleash a sterile kind of vulgar fun-fest where everyone either whoops or wails without rhyme or reason.
The item song by Shweta Menon is so ill-placed you wonder if the editor was on an extended leave. At the end of it Menon is taken away to a mental asylum.
In the second-half, the Tom and Jerry love affair moves to scenic Kodaikanal where we witness a tragic subplot about a star-crossed couple Diana and Robert/Roberts - opinion on the guy's name is divided since he's addressed both ways. The subplot is so sterile and played out so indifferently that it makes us think kindly about the lovebirds at the helm.
At least they look alive.
Arya Babbar brings a bumbling uncertainty to his reckless character. From the dusty campus goon in Mudda to the well-dressed dude parading around in suspiciously neat (studio-compound) streets of this film is a long journey to make.
Newcomer Shriya Saran reminds us of Genelia d'Souza in "Tujhe Meri Kasam". But that could be because the ambience and the lovers' squabbles are near- identical.
Director Ishmayeel Shroff's sensitive hands from his early films "Thodisi Bewafaai" and "Ahista Ahista" are nowhere evident in this stiff mechanical and over-blown remake.
Though parts of the music score (Amar Mohile) are interesting, the sounds are too adaptive to register. The same goes for the 'humorous' subplot about a bunch of collegians and their bizarre pranks on their various landlords.
These 'jokes' occupy about 30 percent of the playing time. The rest of the film is an unintended joke that makes you splutter and choke.
Strangely the director displays a penchant for spreading smoke gas in the tranquil mountains of Kodaikanal.
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