Prince Alarming
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PiyasreeDasgupta Posted: Nov 22, 2008 at 0141 hrs IST
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: Film: Yuvvraj
Director: Subhash Ghai
Cast: Salman Khan, Zayed Khan, Anil Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Boman Irani, Mithun
Chakraborty
Rating: ***
Running at : Inox (Forum, City Centre, Swabhumi)
He hams, hams some more, yells at times, throws glasses here and there, swings
his hips awkwardly, not even wishing he could dance. Meet Prince Charming.
Princess Charming, looks and smiles, sniffs and smiles, sobs and smiles,
whimpers and smiles again. No wonder, Prince is the best she could get. Enter
bad brother and mad brother. Really bad, and not-really-mad. And Subhash Ghai,
thinks he has the perfect show-stealer in hands. But somewhere in the middle,
he gets his sense stolen. And we have Yuvvraj.
There are times, in course of Yuvvraj, you pinch yourself to believe that this
is a Subhash Ghai movie. Yes, the sweeping colourful sets for song sequences, a
little old-fashioned idealistic dialogues do look and sound familiar, but that
hardly compensates for the complete lack of what we can, hesitantly even, call
a story.
As Yuvvraj progresses, it feels like you’re watching an expensive, magnified
version of a daily soap. The story, the exchange between characters, and even
the vamp, looks straight out of a tele-serial. It doesn’t help that Katrina
looks ethereal in her skirt dresses. It doesn’t help that Boman Irani lights up
the screen whenever he shows on it. It doesn’t help that there’s an A R Rahman
song every 10 minute. Because the hotchpotch is unforgivable.
Sample this: Salman Khan is Deven, a cranky aspiring musician, the ‘obsessive
lover’ as the narrator tells you over and over again. His hair is dyed copper,
body bulked up atrociously, speech stilted and accent scarier than Katrina’s.
There’s a hardly a scene where his tortured emotions (he is filled of a ton of
that, says Ghai’s narrator) make themselves visible. He has thrown glasses and
broken things with more vengeance in silly comedies too. He had been thrown out
of his house, twelve years before the story starts, because he beat up his
autistic older brother Gyanesh (Anil Kapoor). Gyanesh is autistic, (the
throwing-pillows, eating-with-a-bib-on type) but sings ragas like you have
heard no maestro sing. He has ‘genius disorder’, says Ghai. So, despite being
autistic he can make out that people had been plotting against him when a video
clip full off crooked filmy speech is shown. You can’t question that. Even if
Kapoor looks like he
zooms in and out...
