When cheesy gets it done

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When cheesy gets it done

BOLLYWOOD’S penchant for remakes, particularly of Hollywood movies, is something all Hindi movie buffs are familiar with.

While some have fared well at the box office, others have flopped dramatically and been labelled utter disasters by fans and critics alike; for example, Players based on The Italian Job.

So when a friend’s treat was taking me to watch the Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma starrer Jab Harry Met Sejal, I was admittedly sceptical about how the Imtiaz Ali-directed film would be.

If you’re a movie lover, you would have noticed how similar the title is to Hollywood’s When Harry Met Sally.

Yes, the story is something similar with two people travelling together but Jab Harry Met Sejal focuses primarily on Khan and Sharma’s characters looking for a lost engagement ring while getting to know each other along the way. And of course, you can’t forget the songs in between.

Khan plays Harinder “Harry” Nehra, a Punjabi tour guide working in Europe with a terrible womanising problem who has to drive Sharma’s Sejal Jhaveri, a lawyer from a rich family who lost her engagement ring while on tour with Harry’s company.

You would think both characters who are shown to have personalities on opposite ends of the spectrum would have nothing in common but hey, it’s a Bollywood movie and you know SRK in a romantic setting will always get the girl.

After all the fights, misunderstandings, gradual friendship, sharing of secrets and eventual love, the ending is what you would expect.

SRK fans who have followed his career over the years and fallen in love with his typical boy-next-door Rahul or Raj roles will be shown something different in this film — an emotionally stunted man who refuses to acknowledge he treats women like trash — until he meets the one, of course.

Sharma’s character on the other hand, progresses from the “goody-two-shoes” to a deviant woman who, in her own words, “leaves her fiancée and runs away with her tour guide”.

It is, in all its glory, your typical cheesy Bollywood movie.

However, as we’ve often seen in Bollywood, the cheesiness works sometimes. And if box office numbers are to be believed, it has worked in this instance.