Producer: Sajid Nadiadwala
Director: Sabbir Khan
Cast: Aftab Shivdasani, Akhsya Kumar, Amrita Arora, Kareena Kapoor, Sylvester Stallone, Denise Richards
Music: Anu Malik, Sulaiman Merchant, RDB

Kambakkht Ishq prances around, joking and laughing, on designer sets and in couture brands, pretending to be a raunchy romantic comedy. But love, actually, is just an asterisk in this desperate, loud and lavish ploy to hit what the director and producer think are all the right buttons for a box office hit.

Set in the fabulous world of Hollywood, Viraj Shergill (Akshay Kumar) is a much-valued stuntman. He is loved by both, the heroes for taking their falls and fisticuffs, and by have-been starlets for being willing and available. Viraj has a flunky who drives him around and scrambles his eggs, and a co-stuntman Lucky (Aftab Shivdasani) who stresses him out by falling in love and deciding to marry lingerie model Kamini (Amrita Arora). Kamini has a friend, Simrita Rai (Kareena Kapoor), who wears slip dresses, challenging heels and carries around some baggage of her mother and sister’s failed marriages. Sim and Viraj crash the wedding ceremony.

While Viraj is against the marriage because he has only known bimbettes, Sim’s objections are more intense. She’s dead against anything that might get women in a vulnerable position vis-a-vis men, and she’s anti-Lucky because he is a stuntman. Duplicates, she figures, run on low IQs. Sim shouts and insults the stuntmen, Viraj smooches her and appreciates her strawberry-flavoured lipgloss. Sim, incidentally, is a two-bit model and an aspiring surgeon whose maasi Dolly (Kirron Kher) keeps gifting her wedding charms that lead to unfortunate accidents.

Kamini and Lucky get married, but Viraj and Sim are determined to wreck it. And soon, love begins to curdle. Meanwhile, a stunt in Hollywood goes wrong and Viraj finds himself on Sim’s operation table. Surgeon in stilettos botches up the operation and leaves Viraj listening to a mysterious hourly wedding chant, Om Mangalam... To save her career Sim must undo the damage and for this she must pretend to be in love with Viraj. She does, but he falls in love.

Once Sim gets what she wants, she insults Viraj and dumps him. Despondent and hurting, Viraj’s self-esteem dips lower than his IQ and he must now find love elsewhere. But before Viraj does something extremely foolish, Sim must acknowledge true love and rescue him.

This big-budget remake of the Kamal Hassan-starrer Tamil film Pammal K. Sambandam, is very low on originality. It titillates and tickles at the absolute basic level — there are hackneyed breast and cleavage jokes, and trite situations where slaps, clothes and cakes fly for no apparent reason. The promise of Hollywood moments too are old Oscar red-carpet clips put together with wrinkled Sylvester Stallone and Denise Richards appearing just to create the context.

Director-writer Sabbir Khan’s desperation for a hit is so apparent that even his sexist jokes don’t cause any real offence. You just find yourself frowning, not out of mortification but in genuine worry for his well-being. The music is unmemorable except for the Om Mangalam chant. While Kareena and Akshay have perfect timing and both look great, there’s no warmth or connect here. Kareena’s size zero or less stuns in every scene. She’s high on style, but low on emotion. Akshay is entertaining and efficient, but in his safe zone.

Courtesy by: DC