zindagi na milegi dobara reviewThe promising Zoya Akhtar turns this wise dictum on its head and suggests that one only live for one's dreams, and not for anything else. Therefore, in the painfully vacuous tourism advert Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, characters are encouraged to forsake reality for adventure. Easier typed than done, that, but the characters in Zoya's film are wealthy enough to not care about the banalities of real life and real relationships, preferring instead to seek succor while on holiday, while the filmmakers try desperately hard to retread genuine greatness achieved in a classic film 10 years ago.
One basic fact: everyone in Dil Chahta Hai [ Images ] could whack a line of dialogue out of the park. Here, on the other hand, we have Hrithik Roshan [ Images ], Farhan Akhtar [ Images ], Katrina Kaif, Abhay Deol and Kalki Koechlin [ Images ]. A fascinating cast of eclectic youngbloods, to be sure, but so marred is each of them -- by either accent or voice -- that the first 20 minutes of the film are spent wincing. Do real people speak like that? Do we sound that painful? No, dear reader, we don't. And the sooner you stop equating the characters of this film with real people the better.
The boys are men pretending to be boys pretending to be men. The result is a group of actors being embarrassingly juvenile while trying to deal with just how badly miscast they all are. Farhan, at his best scowling, gruff or just intensely stoic, is here the funnyman of the bunch, a disastrous decision as anyone who has had the misfortune of sitting through his standup comedy on television will agree. Here too, he is unfunny, almost patently so. Here too, he laughs at his own jokes the loudest. Ouch.
Abhay, playing an effete square only around to be warmly amused by the other two, does the straight-man routine in a way that makes that term sound oxymoronic. Roshan, an undeniably good looking man who shone scene-stealingly in Zoya's last film, here narrows his mouth as if preparing to resuscitate a dying goldfish and speaks nonchalantly about how much money matters.
The pretty Kalki's given an impossibly shrewy character but she's awesome enough to rock a singalong moment in a car, and there's only that much blame we can assign to a character when her father is Suhel Seth. There, there. Katrina just looks bored and, it must be said, unhot. Which seems like a feat in itself. Maybe it's intentional. Maybe Zoya wants to show us that there's more to Kat than her increasingly smoldering looks, but when we see Katrina Kaif [ Images ] on a beach in a movie where the backdrop matters more than anything else, we want her to stun. She doesn't. And those fake shots of her riding a bike are executed with hilarious amateurishness. Still, there is something luminous about the girl.
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