Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya Review

MPKK is a movie with a 20-foot-long anaconda star cast. At the head of the anaconda is the hulky Salman Khan in block letters. Then comes Katrina Kaif. Then Sushmita Sen, then Arshad Warsi, then Sohail Khan so on till the tiny wiggling tail of the anaconda is an unfortunately underutilized Isha Koppikar in an unreadable Marlette font, size 4.4; a flittering little role. These, not counting 'guest appearances' by Arbaaz Khan, Vivek Vaswani, Rajpal Yadav etc.

There are not too many ways to rate a movie at the extreme end of a scale, and to get flowery with such a task is to insult one's own intelligence. The scale becomes binary - black or white, good or bad - and on it, MPKK is an unqualified 'BAD'.

The movie starts off pretty well, with the kind of slapstick and burlesque humor that makes you laugh reluctantly and guiltily. Poor jokes that make you laugh by their sheer audacity. In fact, people around me were laughing to the very end. You can't help it, but it's an aching, fighting-against-your-own-intelligence laughter. "Don't want to be here, don't want to spend 60 bucks on THIS, stop it stop it," kind of laughter.

The story really is inconsequential, but a reviewer must do the due diligence. Sameer (Salman Khan) is an orthopaedician who routinely tells women who are falling for him, that he is married. So that he can avoid them. Then he falls for Sonia (Katrina Kaif}. Unfortunately he has already told her he is married, and so he has to cook up a tale to divorce his fictitious wife so he can marry Sonia. So he ropes in Naina (Sushmita Sen) to play his wife, and the other characters serve to provide further complications to the story.

The movie is unfortunate for a lot of reasons. Gorgeous-looking actors, fancy budgets (apparent from the locales) and beautiful clothes, all wasted terribly on what comes across as a third grade school play scripted hurriedly by the class back-benchers. Push him over, slap him, use an obscenity, tell lies and cheat, drop underpants by mistake and laugh! Makes you wonder what the actors think while playing such dimwitted parts - how can they take their jobs so seriously?

Not to get more anguished about 'just a movie', but God! What a waste of GOOD GOOD MONEY!

Anyway, more detail for you. Katrina Kaif, with her benign yet delectable Virgin Mary looks, is eye candy, and charms and charms. Despite the bad script, her camera-friendliness and sweet looks make you not want to blame her.

Sushmita Sen is totally wasted, and suffers from harsh lighting in at least one song sequence, where her perennially drunken and swollen-eyed look and her creased leathery skin is displayed to her unfortunate disadvantage. It's time she moved beyond the slinky look and item song parts, or opted for dimmer lighting, airbrushing and less-revealing sari blouses. (Since she seems to favor them so after the spectacular success of her Main Hoon Na look). She tries to inject character into her ramrod straightforward role, but despite her commendable efforts, fails.

Salman Khan is good! Innocent-looking (with his grafted hair) and funny for a change.

No Abu Salem and Dawood Ibrahim connection here, and the movie turnout was pretty good despite yesterday's SMS warnings by the public on TV about how they would boycott Khan.

Halfway through the movie, I had lost my will to watch further. Somehow the jokes and noises swam past me, and I let it dissolve into hazy color spots and laughter by my fellow audience. However, a pre-interval scene in the movie really woke me up.

In the mock divorce proceedings for the fictitiously married Khan and Sen, Arshad Warsi, who play-acts the lawyer, likens their failing marriage to a 'Sadi hui Hindi ki picture jo teen ghanton ke bad bhi chalti jaaye, chalti jaaye'. That jolted me out my senses. Sounded like a morbid mistake by the dialogue-writer inadvertently dooming his own movie by describing it so damnably well, right to the audience. I laughed for a few seconds and then quickly memorized the line and kept repeating it to myself for the rest of the movie, pleased to have found my inspiration for writing this.