Review of Mehbooba (2008) by Gagan B — 21 Dec 2008

A throwback from producer-director Khan, attempting to update the classic Hindi romance for an age of fast cars and mobile phones; the results, alas, prove more tortuous than timeless... It's a producer's film, evidently: we jet from location to location, and from one obscenely expensive set-piece to the next, but there's practically zero human interest on display, nor much understanding of how to pace, shape or even cast a film.

Devgan does nothing to dispel my feeling that he's more interesting playing craggy-faced villains than floppy-haired romantic swooners two decades younger than him, while for a supposedly haunting beauty, Arabella Weir-lookalike Koirala appears weirdly awkward in her showcase musical numbers, like a yummy mummy struggling to keep up in post-natal step class.

Mildly steamier than usual - Dutt takes the opportunity to nuzzle his co-star's breasts during one song, and later gets both her and Devgan naked - and there's some novelty in the Hungarian locations, but what's sorely lacking is the ironic distance that made, say, "Far from Heaven" a vital reinvention of the form, any indication the filmmakers are smarter or funnier than the material their predecessors in the field came up with.

Instead, we're offered a joblot of creaking, interminable, more than faintly risible melodrama, and not even the extravagance can save it.