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Kismat Konnection (also Kismet Konnection) (IMDb / Wikipedia )

Kismat Konnection (named spelled all krazy to satisfy the fortune tellers of Bollywood – more on the mysterious practice of numerology and how it relates to box office success) is a typically lightweight and inoffensive bit of fluff, the kind that Bollywood churns out every week. While not unenjoyable, you won’t be pining to spend time with the soppy lovers of the story any more than necessary.

Raj (Shahid Kapoor) was an extremely promising student, and is now an underachieving architect in Toronto. He is also chronically unlucky. His bad luck manifests itself often, ranging from a broken alarm clock to the death of a proposed business partner. Despite this he manages to get his foot in the door of a building firm, and the chance to submit a tender to build a shopping mall. Unfortunately for Raj his erstwhile school classmate Dev also works at the firm. Dev is slick haired, flamboyantly goateed and pure, mischievous evil, hell bent on ruining Raj’s chances at getting the contract. Wow, what happened back at school, boys? Did Dev get his head flushed down the toilet (that would account for the hairstyle)?

So in the usual fragilely constructed conflict, the whole deal rests on Raj’s being able to perform a spectacular and impossible pool shot for his potential boss. Why? Because he is an architect and, as he says,

“I know angles!”

Enter Priya (Vidya Balan) who, it turns out, is Raj’s antithesis – a lucky charm. And more importantly, HIS lucky charm. We know this because in a confused dream Raj went to a bonkers fortune teller unfortunately underplayed by Juhi Chawla – there was much room for improvement in this freewheeling character) – and she told him so. Whenever Priya’s around Raj’s bad luck turns good.

Well, Priya seems like a real bitch to start with, as she storms across the bar and whacks Raj’s pool cue with the intention of screwing his shot up. But she’s unaware of her magical effect on him, and so pulls of the amazing shot with aplomb. Champagne, contracts and pats on the back ensue, as Priya strides out unaware. There follows strangely homoerohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftic scenes of Raj and his mate sawing wood and measuring things (I thought they were architects, not labourers? Shouldn’t they be behind a desk with a set square?), flexing their tank topped muscles at each other.

Eventually Raj finds Priya again and know we get to the crux of the story. And it’s that old chestnut, a community centre sits exactly where the tycoon’s shopping mall is due to land. Priya volunteers there, and the mad old men and women feel like her family. They appear to consist of five patients from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and rather than ensconce them in a public library somewhere so they can stink it up instead, Priya is set on saving their centre for them.
Raj, stuck in a quandary – he needs to build the mall, but he needs Priya near him so he sats lucky, comes up with a plan doomed to fail on every single level. He tells Priya he’ll save the community centre. He tells the tycoon he’ll build his mall. The liar.

Shortly after this he discovers that Priya is going to get married and move away to Australia, taking his luck with her. Terror struck, he is desperate to find a way to keep her in Toronto. Conveniently he discovers her irritable husband in a clinch with the blonde bombshell from the office. Threats are made, and coincidences planned, changes of heart occur. Priya spends time sitting by river, next to what appears to be an industrial waste outlet. There’s a weird doddery old man who sits opposite her and waves. That’s right nothing goes without being heavily signposted, people.

The film climaxes in a melodramatic boardroom scene where Raj reveals his chosen design – one that features both the shopping mall AND the community centre – in a grandstanding display of altruism. Arise film archetype number 1, Heartless Businessman.

“We care about profit, nothing else.”

he declares. Disgraced by Raj’s humanity and innovative thinking – how dare he allow the community centre to continue to exist – the tycoon throws him off the project. Evil nemesis Dev sneers from the sidelines. But wait, here comes weirdo Waving Man. It only turns out that he’s the co-founder of the building firm, and is a sucker for Raj’s public-spirited design. He reinstates him – both the community centre and the mall shall be built!

The pairing of Kapoor and Balan is pleasant but insubstantial, and I expected much more of them. Balan’s smouldering debut in period piece Parineeta highlighted her strengths, and perhaps she is miscast somewhat here as the bubbly, feisty Priya. Kapoor improves a little on his fey character from Jab We Met, but he needs to loosen up a lttle. He looks constipated. The chemistry grows as the film moves on, but never sparkles.

In between the film is full of the dull new corporate language of modern India – people talk about projects, contracts, boards of directors and deals. Raj is supposed to be desperate for work, yet lives in a glossy apartment with flat screen TV and decor out of an IKEA catalogue. Toronto looks grubby, and all the action takes place in an underpopulated, hermetically sealed world. It feels flat and lifeless, and really needed an injection of energy from the songs that wasn’t forthcoming. And only 3 songs!

Krrish (IMBb / Wikipedia)

Krrish stars the musclebound and supremely flexible green-eyed hunk Hrithik Roshan as a feral, mountain dwelling superman. He wears the expression of a gay woodland sprite, startled at every turn by his own special powers. He hangs out with a gang of children and his grandmother, a grey haired, bespectacled old lady played by the regal Rekha. Rekha is one of a handful of Bollywood stars so peerless they are identified by just one name (see also Kajol, Sridevi, Tabu). His world is rocked one day by the parachuted arrival of the delectable Priyanka Chopra, former Miss World and entirely inappropriately nicknamed “Piggy Chops” by one of her previous co-stars. She’s meant to be on some sort of camping weekend, but is happy to lark around with Krishna for a bit, especially after he has demonstrated his miraculous powers by curing her sprained ankles with only a touch of his hand. The film thus meanders up to the intermission with Himalayan-backdropped love songs and Hrithik mooning at Priyanka like a 12-year-old who’s just discovered masturbation.

At this point the film takes an abrupt and hilarious swerve as granny, explaining to Hrithik why he shouldn’t visit Singapore to meet Priyanka’s mother and arrange their marriage, describes how the arrival of blue aliens in response to Hrithik’s father’s intergalactic messaging hobby resulted in his combined mental retardation and mysterious supernatural intelligence. Confused? You won’t be. But you will be laughing so much your bowels may fail. The shot of a fully grown Hrithik Snr. seated in a classroom at a tiny school desk surrounded by eight-year-olds, gurning vacantly, will explain everything you need to know.

He was apparently co-opted by a megalomaniac Singaporean businessman, with a God complex to shame every Bond villain that ever tried to rule the world, into creating a computer that could see into the future. But they apparently looked into the very recent past to design the computer, basing it entirely on Minority Report’s flashy, floating, 3D draggable windows. Just like that film, searching for the simplest piece of data seems to involve manhandling about twenty windows around the workspace in various permutations, whereas in today’s actual, real world, many years prior to that envisaged in these films, all we have to do is … type a few words into the Google search field at the top of our web browser. Amazing, isn’t it?

So, Krishna travels to Singapore, wearing the same disgusting grey plastic mac that his father went in (it’s not clear how the mac came to be back up in the mountains with granny, seeing as dad is missing presumed murdered by a crazed technological genius. I doubt he would have taken the time and trouble to ship back to India a coat that even the most perverse of sexual perverts wouldn’t be seen dead lurking in the bushes in. Still, there it is, and granny fetches it out of the attic to make some adjustments for Krishna, presumably having a hefty supply of grey plastic coat material to put patches in with).

There’s the usual bit of business in Singapore with the Krisha / Priyanka will they / won’t they suspense. Of course they will, but various obstacles have to be overcome first.

A key scene occurs when Krishna observes a street entertainer performing kung fu moves, and collecting money for his little sister’s operation (we know this because he has a sign saying ‘collecting for sister’s operation’). During his act he hurts himself. At this point one wonders why Krishna doesn’t just perform his miracle of healing on the performer, his sister, or both. But instead he chooses the more impressive option, namely performing the kung fu moves himself, and handing over a fat wad of cash to the grateful little girl at the end. Ahhh.

The money shot in the film is a huge fire at a circus, where Priyanka and Krishna have gone for a night out. Krishna picks up a bit of plastic from the floor, fashions it into a mask and proceeds to save several children from the burning wreckage. Next thing he knows he’s all over the news, but luckily his mask has maintained his anonymity. Everyone’s asking who’s “Krrish”. Priyanka suspects it’s him, and goes so far as to set up a bunch of actors to “ambush” him, leading him to retaliate, be captured on video, and thus be revealed. But Krishna guesses what she’s up to, and takes a beating to protect his secret identity. Unfortunately, by a massive coincidence it turns out the gang of thugs is actually real, and they’re giving him a walloping. Priyanka, needless to say, promptly regrets her actions and falls in love with him instead, but doesn’t reveal her true feelings, leaving Krrish accusing her of duplicitous exploitation and questionable loyalties and adamant he will return home ASAP.

At this point the boss’s sidekick, who has been hovering sinisterly in the background up till now, tells Krrish not to go home alone – his dad is still alive. We see a flashback to the creation of the future-telling computer, with its unique password based on Hrithik Snr’s retina and heartbeat. He plugs the computer in, does some Minority Report fannying around with widgets and windows, and promptly sees own death played out on the screen in front of him in a sequence almost certain not to be an homage to Don’t Look Now. He destroys the computer, but is caught by his boss before he can escape. In the intervening period they have been rebuilding the computer but, the dolts, they’ve programmed it to have the same password (Hrithik Snr’s heartbeat, remember? Keep up!) as before, necessitating him being kept alive for the next twenty years in a kind of life support machine that looks like something out of Metropolis, only instead of injecting life into a robot it turns a remedial scientist into a gibbering grey-haired Parkinson’s sufferer.

Now, at last, the computer is ready! The boss logs in using Hrithik’s heartbeat, disposes of him and tunes in to his own forecast channel. What does he see? What else, his own death, of course, at the hands of…Krrish! Krrish then turns up, does some fancy jumping around and lands the boss on his arse with a shard of plastic or something sticking through him.

After that they all fly home to the mountains of India, Krrish, Priyanka and fuddy duddy old cardiganed dad – I bet granny’s pleased to see him, thinking about the constant supervision he’ll need not to stick forks in his eyes while Hrithik and Priyanka bugger off to look at rainbows for the rest of their airy fairy lives.

I must admit that at this point I came closer to crying than I have ever done before at a film. Ever. But then he goes into his bedroom and plays some intergalactic space music on his Amstrad and communicates with the aliens, who send a sort of space wink to him through the stars, and I let out an odd sort of gurgling noise and nearly fell off my chair. Sigh.

Lacking any particularly memorable songs, one of the reasons this film succeeds, as so often the case with otherwise formulaic movies coming out of Mumbai, is the romantic chemistry between the good looking leads, Hrithik and Priyanka. Add to this some innovative stunts and pretty competent CGI and there is the beginning of a new franchise here. Roll on Krrish 2!