Mere brother ki dulhan

I bought a ticket at an Inox. I was in Vizag and thankfully the not so small town has a couple of Inoxes and they do play the latest Hindi movies. Originally I did plan to watch ‘Friends with benefits’ but that was just too much of an expectation for the place I was in. It was a night show on a weekday so we expect a sparsely populated movie hall. Not even the top 2 rows were filled. I had heard a lot of mixed reviews of the movie leaning generously towards the negative side. Some of them who had watched the movies had written it off completely. So the scene was set and I had very low expectations from the movie and that worked wonderfully well.

MBKD is set in a lot of parts of North India. The search is for a dulhan from India for Luv, Ali Zafar, from London. Incidentally the director is also a guy named Ali Abbas Zafar. Wiki says he has been an assistant director to a lot of movies that came under the Yash Chopra banner. Hence he dared to write the story and direct the movie. So the London guy has a brother, Kush, who is incidentally an assistant director too. He has been given the responsibility to pick a bride for his brother Luv. I really love the way parents name their children Luv and Kush when they weren’t born as twins. Intuition at its best I must say. But this is Bollywood so stuff like this shouldn’t surprise us. Kush is our man Imran Khan and his character is very similar to what he played in Break ke baad, in short, goody-two-shoes. He sets out on a bride hunt and he finds Dimple, Katrina Kaif. Dimple is an outgoing girl who believes in living life to the fullest, not quite the Zindagi na milegi dobara way but more the Namaste London way. She wants to settle down and marry too and she decides that Luv is a catch and over a video chat lasting for barely 3 minutes this urban, chic and outgoing yet not loose girl decides that she will get married to him. Luv is due to arrive right before the marriage and Kush is an old lost and found mate who is always available. So what is to happen is pretty evident from the title and the course of events. The story unwinds without any major deviances offers a twist in the end and ends expectedly.

I will cut to the chase and tell you this movie isn’t bad. You can definitely watch it once if you put everything in a very relative perspective. Yash Chopra productions have come out with movies much worse than this. There is no laborious crying or gloomy backgrounds. The actors are all chirpy including the collateral cast such as Parikshit Sahini. There is general excess of emoting in almost all the scenes. That makes this movie seem like a musical. But the music in itself is very catchy and Sohail Sen deserves a pat on the back for that. Imran Khan is bearable and swings effortlessly between underacting and overacting. He is neither great nor bad. Ali Zafar looked like a movie star from the 70’s who had to use a lot of body language to communicate what he was trying to say. Very theatrical and unreal. Katrina Kaif according to me stole the show. She isn’t great always but she never has an awkward presence. After a series of movies where she has played arm candy and a glamour factor she has risen to a place where there is hope that she can actually act. She portrays her character really well and has a charming presence throughout the movie.

The movie is funny at places. In some places the intended humor will fail on the audience. The support cast didn’t have big names. They are decent but aren’t as good to make it to an Anurag Kashyap movie perhaps. The movie is a depiction of an expected series of events portrayed somewhat differently and is also an attempt to project Imran Khan as an actor who can carry a movie on his shoulders despite very strong supporting roles. The latter is where the movie fails. Imran Khan has a long way to be that. Let’s understand that he is the nephew of Aamir Khan not really his clone.
Like I said it is an enjoyable one time watch if you remember to leave everything else home. Don’t go expecting what you saw in ZNMD, Delhi Belly or Tere bin Laden and you might just walk away enjoying a couple of moments of fun and confusion. If you really can’t tolerate a movie that offers nothing in two hours except a couple of kicks here and there, bring home the DVD of Pyaar ka punchnama and watch it again.