Salaam-e-ishq: the review

If this is his idea of a salute to love, the man either needs to seriously learn how to salute, or never fall in love!

Recipe for SEI: Take 5.2 love stories, film them, then give the tape to a 5 year old with a scissors. Then whatever the kid does with them for 30 minutes, try to stick the tape back as best as you can, and then release the film.
A four-hour monstrosity of a movie, it isn't even worth 2 hours. This movie will be discussed in all film schools in India about what not to do when making a film. The execution is even more bizarre, trying to club together a cartoon film, a bollywood movie and a reality show in one entity! The movie is about 6 couples in different parts of the world, in different situations, with the common problem of love. Out of these, only 2 of them can actually be called love, the others are affairs, reality shows, just plain desperation or what has been touted as a love story and beaten to death several times by Bollywood. Akshay Khanna is a loverboy who is freaked out at the idea of marrying his girlfriend, Anil Kapoor is a 40-year old family man who is just bored to death of his monotonous life and looks for some adventure. Govinda is a dare-to-dream taxiwalla in Delhi who dreams of a gori mem coming into his life. Sohail Khan is a desperate man just wanting to "do it" after marrying, but fate simply does not let him. John Abraham and Vidya Balan are a couple eternally in love even when life tests them. If you figure out what Salman Khan and Priyanka Chopra were all about, please let me know!

Let me begin by mentioning what I thought were mere flashes of good or tolerable film-making in this movie. The idea seems fresh for Bollywood, although I'm told that Love Actually is based on this premise. The execution is interesting at some places. The music is good (don't get me started about the placement of songs in the movie though). And believe it or not, the director has managed to weave these stories into each other quite well (in the sporadic moments that these characters that are strangers to each other just happen to cross paths). Lastly, all the heroines look very good in the movie. That is about it.

I think only the story of John and Vidya is worth any appreciation and time. Their story had room for some extremely filmy twists and turns and the director has resisted the temptation to make most of them. They were appropriately cast for their part. Govinda's story is like a 2007 version of Raja Hindustani, and he and Shannon Esra do have some entertaining moments on screen. The scene where Govinda's filmy dream about how the gori of his dreams will appear actually materializes is quite innovative. Anil Kapoor has almost nothing to do, except a scene where he hopelessly tries to act like a 19-year old to impress his girlfriend and thoroughly embarrasses himself (he is meant to do that in the story). Akshaye Khanna is the quintessential bachelor who freaks out at the idea of commitment and of course, realizes in 4 hours that he is wrong. Priyanka Chopra plays the item-girl actress who creates a fictitious love interest for publicity and to get an offer from "karan johar", and is bamboozled when Salman Khan appears as her fictitious hero in real life. Of course, like any other reality show, she ends up (oh so fakely) falling for him in the end. Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar form the remaining 0.2 part of the movie.

The end is especially traumatic for the audience, when the movie refuses to end like an tasteless chewing gum that just cannot be spit out. Heroes borrow each other's dialogues, poor Ayesha Takia gets married in three phases, and Salman Khan says the same thing twice. I was especially puzzled, intrigued and disappointed at the fact that Govinda had only about 10 seconds of dancing, while we were subjected to robotic Salman and mediocre Akshaye for 2-3 entire songs! I mean that's just poor resource management.
To conclude, the director should've just stuck to John and Vidya's love story. That would've resulted in a much shorter and hopefully much better movie (one with a script!). But then with Kal Ho Na Ho as precedence, what was I thinking?