Producer: Anil Kapoor & Satish Kaushik 
Director: Satish Kaushik 
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Shilpa Shetty, Kirti Reddy, Amrish Puri, Kadar Khan, Farida Jalal
Music: Anu Malik
Lyrics: Javed Akhtar

When will Bollywood finally learn? Time and again Bollywood tries to imitate Hollywood? But the result most often is disastrous. Satish Kaushik's Badhaai Ho Badhaai is yet another movie inspired in part by the 1996 Eddie Murphy film,The Nutty Professor, playing the part of the obese Prof Sherman in the desi version is Anil Kapoor. But in trying to add the nutty crust of Hindi masala things go sour and Satish creates a demon.

While The Nutty Professor was a delightful comedy about a horizontally generous professor, Badhaai Ho Badhaai is a slapstick, slapdash venture with too many subplots that manage to only confuse the audience. The Chaddhas (Amrish Puri, Farida Jalal and Govind Namdeo), and the D'Souzas (K Vishwanath, Rohini Hattangdady), are friends turned foes after their daughter and son, respectively, elope and marry. The two families now cannot stand each other and are constantly at war.

Enter, Raja (Anil Kapoor), who claims to be the son of the pair who had eloped and has come back to meet them. The two families spurn him, unwilling to let go of the past. Raja and his friend Lucky Iyer (Suresh Menon), a Sikh with a South Indian accent, then move in with Ghuman Singh (Kader Khan), a boisterous singer who is the only one in the neighbourhood willing to take them in.

Raja wins over his grandparents, who soon start pressurising him to marry a girl of their choice. The Chaddha grandmother (Farida Jalal), wants her grandson to marry a Hindu girl to pave the way for his rehabilitation into their family, while Grandma D'Souza (Rohini Hattangady), wants to find him a Christian girl. To save another feud, Raja says he is already married to Banto Betty, a girl whose name and existence he dreams up on the spur of the moment. A few days later, a Banto Betty (Shilpa Shetty) actually walks into the village claiming to be his wife.

Suspence? Who is she? Flashback to an overweight Raja in love with beautiful neighbour Florence (Keerti Reddy). She sings his songs, has him teach her mathematics and declares that size does not matter for the man she will fall in love with. Yet Raja decides to shed his flab and turn into Prince Charming to woo her, only to discover that she is in love with and all set to elope and marry someone else.

Now to twist the audience into confusion, Florence belongs to the D'Souza family. Her beau (Vinay Jain) is the Chaddha grandson. Now before to exclaim ‘what a coincidences!’ Raja has decided to sort things out for the girl he loves. So finally what happens to Banto Betty? Well we aren’t telling you that. Cinematographer Rajeev Jain and art director Sharmisha Roy have done one hell of a good job. But the same cannot be said about the music.

Its an anil Kapoor movie all the way, thin or fat, Anil is the best. Second to him is Kader Khan, he is old wine in a new bottle, the man, surely gets better as he ages. After two consecutive flops in Hindi, Keerthi as the self-seeking Christian girl proves third-time lucky. She has been dressed and projected very well. Shilpa Shetty as Banto Betty, the loud aggressive Punjabi woman masquerading as Anil's wife is a nightmarish synthesis of Kajol in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

Like most of Kaushik's directorial ventures which have been faithful adaptations of Tamil-Telugu blockbusters. Badhaai Ho Badhaai is no exception. However, Badhaai Ho Badhaai is marred by a poor script, loud acting and slapstick packaged as humor. And despite its attempt to piggyback on one of Hollywood's successful comedy films, it fails to redeem itself. However its biggest draw is the wonderful visual aesthetics. Kaushik avoids studio sets to take us into an outdoor freedom denied to most mainstream Hindi films.

But he messes up an otherwise cute entertainer with an over-the-top climax where the two warring families run with guns to a lonely spot for a desi equivalent of a duel under the sun. Tact and subtlety aren't the highlights of this film.