Excerpt: This one is a “let’s live our childhood Hollywood and girls-in-bikinis fantasies, at someone else’s expense” piece of cinema. At times cheap, at other times boring, and at all times poor, Kambakkht Ishq is distinctly avoidable. 1 star out of 5. Very poor.

Review: Carrying forward the recent trend in Hindi films of not having much to do with India, its people or way of life, Kambakkht Ishq is a collection of dreams that every teenage boy in India has – about Hollywood lifestyle, full with great, flashing bodies of blondes. Alas, the cinema version of that dream has turned out to be quite a nightmare.

Viraj Shergill (Akshay Kumar) is a stunt man in Hollywood, who is not only extremely close with the superstars that he acts as the ‘body double’ of, but also leads a life of a casanova in and around the Universal Studios, Hollywood. For someone who sleeps with women at breakfast, lunch and dinner, he does well to actually be hating girls and, indeed, the concept of marriage. Giving him good company in the opposition to the ‘institution of marriage’ is Simrita Rai (Kareena Kapoor), a doctor who doubles up as a supermodel to pay her fees! Meeting for the first time at the marriage of Viraj’s brother Lucky (Aftab Shivdasani) and Simrita’s friend Kamini (Amrita Arora), the two leading actors then take the film all over the place - to show the ‘real side’ of the opposite sex to their respective best pals; to show each other down during dumbwit situations; and to show the exit door to the audience.

In between, what is billed as the ‘battle of sexes’ there are seasoned actors like Javed Jafferey (in his now-familiar over-the-top Sindhi/Gujarati act), Boman Irani (in his now-familiar over-the-top doctor act) and Kirron Kher (in her now-familiar over-the-top single mom act) coming on to the screens to justify the cheque and the stay in Hollywood. But with Akshay Kumar doing more of the same comic act all over again and Kareena Kapoor merely adding a few more grams to her alluring posterior (since her Tashan days), while mouthing the same ’Poo’ lines, one can’t really blame the character actors of the film, can we? 

The much-touted and publicised Hollywood ‘association’ is a huge sham – what with Stallone punching a few baddies in a two-minute sequence, Brandon Routh mouthing a couple of lines and looking generally stupid and Denise Richards looking unattractive in bikini and while crying.

The music of the film is horrendous; with the first song of the film being a clear favourite for the ‘Worst Song of the Decade’ award. The background music is even louder. And yet, the actors generally shout even over that background din.

What saves the day for the film, if at all it does, are the locales and the life-life reproduction of the imagery by Vikas Sivaraman, the cinematographar of the film.

Kambakkht Ishq is like a advertisement, which tries to sell a bike by showing a curvy girl in undergaments washing the machine. In advertisements like those, the director knows precisely which ’seat’ the audience would be watching; while the producer merely hopes that the director’s conviction is proven correct. Alas, as it often happens in such cases, the audience doesn’t really buy the seat that it didn’t see; and can’t really buy the ‘seat’ that was merely used to sell the bike.

THE INDIC POST says – Stay away from the film!