Krrish

I just scouted around the internet for reviews of KRRISH, Bollywood's first big-budget superhero movie. The movie has a 100% positive rating on the tomatometer, and everyone seems to love it.

All of these people are on crack.

Somewhere in Krrish's two hours and fifty-five minutes of bloat, there's a solid little 85-minute superhero movie. Unfortunately, the filmmakers couldn't or wouldn't edit their work sufficiently ruthlessly to get to that good, fast-paced movie, so we're left with an incredibly long shampoo commercial.

Here's the setup: young Krishna is a supergenius whose grandmother hides him in a remote mountain village, far away from the eyes of evil men who would use him, if they could. The village appears to be populated by a gang of good-natured youths, a goofy sidekick, a brilliant dentist, the world's greatest hairdresser, and at least one guy who owns a gym and has access to steroids. Krishna grows up in an extended woodland idyll, maturing into an innocent gym rat with perfect teeth and hair that would put Robin Shou to shame. Oh, and he has superpowers.



Soon enough, the inevitable occurs. Krishna meets a girl, an ethnic Indian on holiday from Singapore, whose hair is even better than his.

He follows her to Singapore, where he dazzles the locals with his flowing mane.


But it isn't long before evil intervenes, and Krishna must assume a new identity - Krrish!- and save the day through the power of wind-blown locks (btw, Krrish's locks are always windblown. One of his superpowers must include the ability to levitate an invisible fan two feet from his face.).


Damn. There's slo-mo closeup of Krrish, having just risen from the sea, whipping his head about and sending perfectly lit drops of water flying everywhere. Google image search is turning up nothing.

Anyway, back to the recap. Krrish saves the world, wins the girl, and even gets a shave. There's your movie.

And it's a perfectly fine template for a movie, but it doesn't quite work. The guy who plays Krishna, Hrithik Roshan, is a skilled dancer and a fine stuntman, but his three expressions seem to be winning grin, winning grin, and palsy. The gal who plays the eventual damsel in distress (oops - spoiler!), Priyanka Chopra, appears to be more talented, but director Rakesh Roshan (Hrithik's dad, which makes the lingering shots of Hrithik's muscles, hair, and teeth kinda creepy, now that I think about it) must've told her to play to the cheap seats, because there is absolutely no mystery in her face whatsoever. It's all right there. Add astoundingly poor special effects, a score that's a direct ripoff of Danny Elfman's work on SPIDER-MAN, and the incongruous musical numbers that Bollywood demands, and you have a movie that wears out its welcome at the 90-minute mark. Had this film been edited from three to 1.5 hours, the actors would have had less time to grate; the poorer CGI sequences could have been edited out, and we might have been left with a fun, masala-flavored masked avenger flick.

But wishful thinking gets us nowhere. As it stands, KRRISH is a three hour long mess. This time around, I took one for the team.