Gori Tere Pyaar Mein review: Kareena, Imran make a boring film!

Tooh (Bum). Between Bigg Boss, KBC and Comedy Nights With Kapil, TV watchers have seen Kareena Kapoor Khan and Imran Khan all over the place, shaking their booty-shooties trying to get us excited about their latest release – Punit Malhotra’s Gori Tere Pyaar Mein. No one could have escaped this song, because if not on TV, then it’s on loop at every wedding sangeet. Unfortunately, what was the highlight of all promotional activity of GTPM is pretty much the highlight of the movie too. We haven’t had a light, feelgood rom-com in a while and I walked in really wanting to like this movie. Also, the alternative was Sunny Paaji’s Singh Saab The Great and that title is all you really need to know to stay away from it. [caption id=“attachment_1245043” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A still from Gori Tere Pyaar Mein. IBN Live.[/caption] In GTPM, we are introduced first to Sriram Venkat (Imran Khan), a highly unconvincing America-educated Tamilian architect from Bangalore. He’s shallow and self-centred and his parents are fed up of him not doing anything significant with his life. In something of a final straw, the ‘kaala dappa’ of the family bunks his own grandfather’s funeral to score with a girl he just met at a club and fortifies his father’s poor opinion of him. Like every other Indian parent you and I know, the only solution to life, the universe and everything is marriage. So Sriram’s parents figure they should get him on that plan immediately. Enter Vasudha (Shraddha Kapoor)—Tamilian, Iyer, pretty and option number one. Sold! To the pale gentleman in the Wayfarers. Except she’s in love with someone else. She can’t tell her parents this herself though, so she needs him to say he’s not interested. But he is and so he says yes (he’s self-centred and all, remember?), and then proceeds to tell his bride-to-be about the ex-love of his life because that’s the only way to go into endless flashbacks, chinggum chabake. Enter Dia Sharma (Kareena Kapoor Khan), a vegetarian Punjabi, fighter of all causes (‘NGO type’) and Sriram’s polar opposite. He’s so taken by her that he now does things like adopting a crab instead of eating it at the restaurant, naming it Sandy and keeping it in his room on her happy suggestion. The rest of the love story revolves around Sriram and Dia trying to make things work, and it does and then it doesn’t and then Dia reaches a village in Gujarat where she decides she wants to live and do make a real difference yada yada. Sriram ends up following her there to bring her back, but she won’t budge till she’s built the village a much-needed bridge. So he pulls up his fumbling architect sleeves and tries to speed up the process. The lapses in logic are frequent, the loopholes numerous, and the story takes forever to get started only to fall flat. There’s the occasional amusing moment—the south Indian wedding for instance, or Diya’s parents pointing out potential suitors in the crowd that’s gathered for her grandmother’s funeral—but there’s no real punch, and it’s only a fleeting distraction from what is otherwise a bit of a snoozefest. The dialogues aren’t particularly clever either, the costumes are uninspired, and none of the performances stand out. Vishal-Shekhar’s soundtrack is full of peppy tracks that will work well on the dance floor, but don’t have any solid relevance to the film. When you exit two and a half hours later, you realise while the film was plodding along. You’ve played three levels of Candy Crush Saga on your phone and eaten more popcorn than you wanted to help you pass the time. GTPM is not a colossal failure, but let’s just say I wouldn’t insist you hit the theatre if you’ve got other plans for your weekend.