Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai (2000)

Star Power: Hrithik Roshan, Ameesha Patel

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 7 chilies

Music: 5 out of 7 chilies

Choreography: 4.5 out of 7 chilies


Synopsis:

Rohit (Hrithik Roshan) is a young man dreaming of making it big in the music business, but that dream seems a long way away. He and his little brother Amit are orphans living with an older couple while Amit goes to school and Rohit works a job at a car dealership. When he meets beautiful Sonia Saxena (Ameesha Patel) while waiting for traffic, he never expects to see her again, but they are soon brought together when her father, (Anupam Kher) a wealthy businessman, sends Rohit to deliver a car to her on her birthday. As time passes, Mr. Saxena sees their budding romance and tries to put a stop to it by having Rohit fired from his job, but when he sees that he will not be disuaded, he encourages Rohit to make a big step forward in his music career to impress Sonia.
Word begins to spread about his musical talent and soon things are all set for his first big concert. However, fate suddenly intervenes when, while on his way to the concert with Amit, he witnesses the murder of a police commissioner by corrupt officers who have been dealing in drugs. He tries to escape from the scene but they follow and eventually force him off a bridge into the river. Unable to swim, he drowns, leaving Sonia and Amit heartbroken behind him. Amit is stricken, unable to speak, and Sonia travels to New Zealand to try to escape her grief. In the street she catches sight of a man who looks startlingly like Rohit. Who can he be? And will anyone ever know the truth about Rohit's death?...

Comments:

This movie is the debut of both Hrithik Roshan and Ameesha Patel and, overall, it's a fairly solid outing for the both of them. The plot is fairly conventional and rather slow to get going, but there are some good twists and everything flows pretty well. Sonia and Rohit are pretty much the typical sweet young lovers, but Anupam Kher gives a good and surprising performance as Sonia's conflicted father. The music is also solid, with a few catchy numbers like the title song and "Chand Sitaare", both of which are repeated in several different incarnations throughout the film. Not a standout picture, in my opinion, but entirely watchable and enjoyable.

Kites (2010)

Star Power: Hrithik Roshan

Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 7 Chilies

Music: 3 out of 7 Chilies

Choreography: 3.5 out of 7 Chilies

Synopsis:
While unloading a train car, a group of Mexican workers come upon the unconsious body of a man shot in the back. The man, Jai (Hrithik Roshan) is nursed back to health by nearby farmers and begins a long trek across the Mexican landscape, recalling the series of events which have left him in this state.
Three months earlier, Jai was a poor dance teacher in the city of Las Vegas, conning the casinos and marrying women eager to get green cards in order to make an extra buck. One day, one of his dance students, Gina (Kangna Ranaut) follows him home and professes her love for him. He refuses and sends her home, only to find that she is the daughter of casino-owner Bob Grover, one of the richest and most well-connected men on the strip. Rethinking his refusal, Jai sets out to marry Gina for her money. Even when brutally confronted with the Grovers' mafia-like control of the city and their nonchalance to violence, he decides to keep playing along, but it is his meeting with Natasha (Barbara Mori), Gina's brother Tony's fiance, that changes everything. Natasha, (whose real name is Linda) was the last of the eleven women that Jai married, and the only one he ever really noticed. On the pretence of finalizing their divorce in secret, the two meet up and discover that they are both only marrying into the Grover family for the money and that their true love is for each other. A fight with Tony makes up their minds and they decide to flee the city together, but escape is anything but easy...

Comments:
"It always rains in Vegas." This utterly absurd statement about a desert city in which the average rainfall per month is never more than half an inch and which boasts about having more than 300 sunny days per year is just a small indication of just how silly, confusing and terrible this movie was. After watching this film, my family and I sat down and had a good long laugh about all the stupid things in this movie which made absolutely no sense. Here's an example, just to give you an idea: about half-way through the film, Jai and Linda are on the run and the bad guys are about to catch up to them in the middle of the desert when they run across a bunch of people taking off in hot air ballons. They suddenly decide to make their escape by jumping on to one of these ballons as it lifts off into the air and they leap in from their moving truck, taking control from the passengers, who only speak Chinese. Their truck then crashes into another car and explodes, the smoke cloud screening their escape. Now, let's think about this. For one thing, I don't think you could find a slower, more highly visible and vulnerable means of escape than a hot air balloon - one shot in the canvas and you come right back down to earth, and the smoke cloud would hide them for all of, what, thirty seconds? All the bad guys had to do was walk around it and our heros would still be there, twenty feet away, slowly drifting skyward. But no, in the next scene Tony gets a call saying they've gotten away (temporarily, of course). Also, one has to wonder how a pair of Chinese tourists who don't speak a word of English managed to arrange to be part of a ballooning group and then got sent up alone. Unless these are ballooning experts from Szechuan, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. The movie is filled with silly and annoying moments like this and the continuity is not helped by the choppy narrative style, which switches back and forth between the present, Jai's flashbacks and flashbacks within the flashbacks. Clearly a lot of money was spent making this film, with lots of high-speed chases, explosions, gunfire and Hrithik himself, but in the end you can't help feeling that it was all kind of wasted. The music is basically a non-factor - there's not much of it and it's not particularly remarkable. Kites, (a title which, by the way, has no explanation in the story, except for a non-sequitur voice-over in the beginnning) basically tries to capture the feeling of about fifty different movies - Bonnie and Clyde, Ocean's Eleven, Dhoom, etc. - but ends up so confused that it's worse than all of them. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" - so please, by all means, leave this movie there.