Review of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) by Todd B — 28 Sep 2012

Bad dialogue and effective storytelling come to an intense confrontation in this long, star-studded Bollywood Hit about friendship and college romance. I'm going to be frank here: This movie possesses some of the most painful and hard-to-sit-through moments I have ever watched in a motion picture --- at least in its first 45 minutes. The overly goofy and silly dialogue combined with the cheesy performances from actors Shahrukh Khan and Kajol all the way to the stage dancers make KKHH feel as downright offensive to my intelligence as this run-on sentence. But once again, I digress...it's really about love, right?

And what love there is, in the juicy, melodramatic plot. KKHH runs on the love triangle formed by the three central characters who meet during college. Needless to say, many things go awry and plenty of volatile emotions are stirred --- so many emotions!

What I like in KKHH is the clever use of flashbacks/back-stories to make it one of the few Bollywood films that actually justifies its two-act structure. The melodic songs were also strong. What I found tedious was the cheesy dialogue, acting, and rather bland dance sequences, the latter of which were surprisingly weak for a Hindi film, especially when compared to the fantastic set pieces of a film like 'Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.'.

Altogether, this is one of the weaker Bollywood "hits" I have seen. It ends in a pretty satisfactory way, but that alone cannot make up for its mind-numbing, juvenile acting and dance scenes that don't deliver the goods. But the main culprit here is once again the poor dialogue. Viewers can either choose to educate themselves on this issue or live in fanboy denial. I maintain that there are two kinds of people in this world --- people that understand what I'm saying, and people that like this vomit-inducing colloquy.