Director: Sabbir Khan
Producer: Sajid Nadiadwala
Story / Writer: Anvita Dutt Gupta, Ishita Mohitra, Sabbir Khan
Screenplay: Kiran Kotrial, Anvita Dutt Gupta, Ishita Mohitra, Sabbir Khan
Music director: Rdb, Anu Malik, Sulaiman Merchant, Salim Merchant
Star cast: Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Aftab Shivdasani, Amrita Arora, Vindu Dara Singh, Javed Jaffrey, Kirron Kher, Boman Irani
Chaotic entertainer to the hilt
Filmmaking standards in Bollywood seem to have gone really high. Producers now opt for Sylvester Stallone over Sunny Deol for that mandatory special appearance in the climax as the messiah who saves the heroine from hoodlums. The shady second female fiddle who the heroine keeps abusing through the film has upgraded from Rakhi Sawant to Denise Richards. If that indirect insult to Hollywood still seems indicative, there is much more hardcore swearing in store.
Kambakkht Ishq belongs to the same family of films, which have wooed the masses, such as Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, Welcome, Singh Is Kinng and Golmaal Returns. The prime motive is to entertain you for the next 2 hours, logic be damned.
Yet, Kambakkht Ishq is different because it depicts the battle of the sexes, a theme that's rarely depicted on the Hindi screen. The lingo is poles apart, so is the attitude. In fact, this is a modern take on relationships, with the two hours divided between laughter and emotions, frivolous and reality. Kambakkht Ishq is a masala entertainer, but will not find its place on the top of the order.
Viraj (Akshay Kumar), an Indian stuntman working in Hollywood, is a compulsive womanizer who goes flirting around with every other woman in the town. Hey Baby, doesn't that sound familiar, Akki? For one good hour, he goes on flirting outrageously with Simrita (Kareena Kapoor), a supermodel who is more of a mannequin with a disgusted face.
Miss Supermodel doubles up as a surgeon who, in an operation, leaves a timepiece inside stuntman's stomach. Suddenly the duo tries to woo each other just so that they can dump them later. Didn't Kareena attempt the same with Akshaye in Hulchul?
Director Sabbir Khan's motive is simple: Entertain for the next 2 hours. The entire first hour moves at a lightening speed, making you enjoy the war of words between Akshay and Kareena at regular intervals. Things are smooth sailing till the emotional angle comes up. The narrative dips in those 20 odd minutes. The mood suddenly shifts from laughter to sadness. The makers may argue that a twist in the tale is justified from the writing point of view, since the emotional track is vital for any love story, but the fact remains that one does miss the entertainment quotient here. In fact, the dip in the second hour erodes, to a large extent, the impression that the first half had built so magnificently.
Coming to the acting department, Kambakkht Ishq belongs to both, Akshay and Kareena. Akshay is dynamic this time. He received a lot of flak for Chandni Chowk To China and there was this nagging feeling that the negativity would spill over to Kambakkht Ishq. But Akshay is in terrific form here and delivers, without a shred of doubt, a bravura performance. If you loved him in Namastey London and Singh Is Kinng, you'd fall in love with Akki and his comic timing all over again this time.
To sum up, Kambakkht Ishq offers you value for time and also, value for money. It offers loads of entertainment in those 2 + hours, loads of glamour in those 130 odd minutes, from start to end. Sure, there are blemishes, but they're trivial when you look at the larger picture.
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