Namastey London
Director: Vipul Amrutlal Shah
Year: 2007
Music: Himesh Reshammiya; Lyrics: Javed
Akhtar
Rating: 3.0
Duration: 128 minutes
This cheerfully dimwitted film is so inept
that I kept blinking my eyes in amused disbelief. It was like sitting next
to a guy on the subway who keeps laughing to himself – you are glad he’s
happy but you sure wish he were somewhere else. What surprises me most though
has been the generally positive reception that this film has received – making
me wonder if global warming has begun to affect our brain patterns or whether
people simply judge Bollywood films on totally different criteria than films
from anywhere else? I have been guilty of this latter condition certainly
and in truth you have to watch Bollywood films with a different set of sensibilities
than you do others – because they are so culturally different – but no matter
where you are bad acting is bad acting, bad editing is bad editing, bad cinematography
is bad cinematography and bad story telling is bad story telling. This film
reeks with a painful lack of imagination that it tries to cover up with cute
performances and apparently it worked.
Jazz (played by Katrina Kaif who is most
famous for being the girlfriend of Salman Khan and for not getting a black
eye yet) is short for Jasmeet, but living most of her life in London she
has tossed her Indian culture overboard and just wants to be an English girl
– though thankfully not to the point of eating bad English food. As most
Indians living in England are portrayed in Bollywood films, her family is
enormously wealthy though her father (Rishi Kapoor) never seems to work and
she lives in a house large enough to play a game of cricket in. She also
likes pale blond bad boys and has latched on to her boss who goes by the
name of Charlie Brown – which passes for wit in this film. He has an even
bigger house and meets with Prince Charles from time to time when he isn’t
shagging other girls or getting divorced. Charlie that is, not the Prince.
Of course, dear dad isn’t too thrilled
with Jazz hanging about with British boys and so takes her to India where
she goes through a round robin laugh-a-thon of boorish boys and their silly
parents meeting to discuss marriage. But dad thinks he has struck gold when
he meets the son of a friend who falls in love with Jazz at first sight.
Why Arjun (Akshay Kumar) loves her at first sight is one of those mysteries
of the universe – could it be a. she is a total spoiled air head, b. she
has no respect for Indian traditions, c. she can't speak Hindi, d. she turns
up her nose at everything Indian, e. she ignores him, f. she can't dance
worth a lick, g. there are no eligible single women in India, h. she has
very nice breasts. I put my money on h. Not that he is a great prize either
as he is past forty and drinks milk right out of the cow’s udder and thinks
that’s how you impress women. No wonder he is still single. In fact, it wasn’t
until after the intermission that I realized he wasn’t mentally disabled.
Her brilliant plan is to do the marriage circle thing with him – postpone
the honeymoon night shenanigans - and then back in London tell everyone that
they aren’t really married because nothing was registered. After she does
this, it of course only makes him love her more with a desire to continue
to pursue her - even after she announces that she is marrying the weenie
Brit. Gosh, I wonder how this film is going to end.
Filled with more bad acting than a convention
of Republicans pretending to be compassionate towards the poor, this is like
watching a very long high school play. Akshay in his oddly dyed brown hair
just looks so bored that he gives off an attitude of tell me my lines and
let me get this over with please. But this doesn't even come close to how
bad Katrina is in acting and it's not only that she has to wrestle with the
language like a Brazilian grappler - she just has no clue how to add shades
or depth to a character. Her scene when she tells the family and Arjun that
she didn't consider herself married was so poorly read that I felt embarrassed
for her. It’s not really her fault. She lived abroad most of her life having
been born in London and came back to India with a smattering of Hindi. This
is the first film in which she wasn’t dubbed. She modeled and hooked up with
Salman – became a gossip commodity and moved right into films. Who needs
to learn how to act?
Worse than the acting though is the stereotypes
this film targets for humor – that wealthy Brits are snotty, prejudiced,
immoral and can't even play a good game of rugby – likely true but rather
tiresome and blandly done. Considering that Katrina is from mixed Indian/English
parents, it seems rather odd to push the point that good Indian girls should
marry down home Indian boys. At one point when your typical effete Brit makes
fun of Indians and quotes Churchill to support this, Arjun nobly lectures
him with a litany of stats about how many newspapers there are in India and
engineers and so on – not bad for a farm boy. I guess Indians really are
good with numbers (stereotype intended). Here is another number: