Genre: Drama
Director: Subhash Ghai
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Salman Khan, Zayed Khan, Katrina Kaif, Boman Irani, Mithun Chakraborty
Storyline: Rain Man set in Austria with paintings and music, minus the best parts.
Bottomline: Ghai lives in the eighties
The best part about Yuvvraaj were the trailers that played during the interval.
Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance seems like an insider’s take on the Hindi film industry starring Farhan Akhtar, Konkana Sen, Rishi Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Sanjay Kapoor, Isha Shervani, Dimple Kapadia and surprise, surprise… Hrithik Roshan.
The promo of Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye entertained much more in a minute with its fun vibe than all of Yuvvraaj and Sunny Deol seems to be making a comeback to serious cinema with a courtroom drama ‘Right Yaa Wrong’ opposite Irrfan Khan. Whoa!
The future is bright. Truly time for Ghai to gracefully raise his hat and retire. No self respecting filmmaker would have continued to make films after a film like Kisna. But Ghai is made of thicker stuff.
If you’ve forgotten your moral science lessons from school or the villains from that era, you have to thank Mr.Ghai for taking you back to that time in Hindi cinema when greedy relatives used poison to kill the rightful heir to a huge fortune.
That long forgotten era when dialogues were considered to be subtle as long as the hero didn’t introduce himself as “Main Salman Khan Is Film Ka Main Hero Hoon.” In Yuvvraaj, the vamp never expressly uses the word “gold-digger” to admit that she’s one. She just says she wanted him only as long as he had his money and style.
Subhash Ghai is the master of that kind of subtlety (We suspect he also interned with Sanjay Leela Bhansali during Black and Saawariya).
It’s quite subtle how he quietly sneaks in a huge painting of wolves to form the backdrop of a scene where the villains get together to conspire against the hero.
A few scenes later, he shows us multiple shots of masks to suggest that one of the characters has started to believe that people are not what they are. Just to make sure you got that brilliant metaphor, the showman also shows us two characters literally holding the masks and taking them off. Cue in the music and the melodrama. What a waste of truly epic music. Let’s hope Rahman got paid a bomb for this. It would hurt any creator to see his work used like this, no matter how grand the sets look.
Yuvvraaj, like its title, is so beyond its expiry date and old fashioned, that Ghai probably wrote his script in hieroglyphics. That should explain quite a bit of that visual cues that dominate production design.
After taking half the length of the film to do what Barry Levinson’s ‘Rain Man’ did within its first ten minutes, Ghai tries to set the stage for Anil Kapoor to do a Dustin Hoffman in the second half of the
film. He replaces mathematical prowess with musical genius, trying to recreate the Taal effect.Anil is quite sincere too but what can he do in a role where he comes across like Michael Jackson in a room full of children. But obviously, Ghai has filled his room with children to subtly show you that this mentally ill man may need to constantly dye his hair black but he is like a child too.
Salman Khan is good where he has to fool around and just chill, chill but when it comes to heavy-duty drama, you just can’t take Sallu wearing a shirt, a suit and what not… Obviously he would be suffocated. And what’s with bad hair dye in this movie?
Katrina is quite natural when she has to moon over Salman and honestly, she does not need to act to win us over. Zayed Khan gets plenty of action here in a role that just needs to him act cool and
slap the hell out of Anil Kapoor. From what we see of the vamps, it is obvious that Mr.Ghai knows what the front-benchers want to see. He simply must graduate to porn for he seems to have a natural flair for erotica.
Unfortunately however, Yuvvraaj isn’t amusingly bad as Kisna and features no kinky Tarzan dance. This is the kind of bad film that you can’t even laugh at because when you have been held hostage for over three hours to endure painfully staid moral science lessons, the joke is on you.
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MADRAS INK. 