Andaz Apna Apna (1994)

 

Andaz Apna Apna (1994)

Starring:

Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Raveena Tandon, Karisma Kapoor

 

 

You know when I said that other movie was the worst Bollywood movie I had ever seen? We have a new winner and champeen. AAA plumbs the very pinnacles of overacting, the depths of wretched editing jobs and perhaps the most predictable storyline ever. And if you are a BW fan, I think you understand the ramifications of that accusation.

Aamir is the spoiled, disrespectful son of a barber who sells his father’s shop out from under him and takes the money so he can travel to another city and meet and marry a wealthy heiress who has famously come to India with her horribly overacting personal assistant to find a husband. Salman is a spoiled, disrespectful son of a tailor who wants to be famous and steals all his father’s money to pay the producers of “Wow Wow Productions” to make him a star. And also so he can travel to another city and meet and marry the same wealthy heiress. Along with about a thousand other men. So Aamir and Salman end up meeting on the bus, doing a terrible song and dance to their destination, and then finding out they are in competition. After an arrest, a few beatings, conning their way into living in the house with Raveena (the rich one) and Karisma (the asst.), aamir gets paired off with Raveena and Salman with Karishma. You can tell Salman and Karisma are falling for each other because every time they look at one another they each start batting their eyes and turning their heads side to side and smiling. Cause that’s what people do when they’re in love.

Anyway, as anyone who has ever seen a movie can see coming, turns out it’s Karisma who’s the heiress and Raveena who is the assistant! Karisma just wanted to be sure her husband loved her for herself, not her money! Oh, I forgot to say that there is a bad guy who is the identical twin brother of the heiress’ father and he hates his brother and wants the heiress dead. So his two goons get themselves assigned as her bodyguards or some such position that allows them to live in the house. They make multiple attempts to kill the girl but as this is a comedy, they always fail. Hilariously! So blah blah to the end where the father comes to town and they guys try to impress him by setting up his kidnapping so they can rescue him, but, again with the predictability, he’s really kidnapped by the villains! Mistaken identity hijinks ensue. At the very end they’re all in a warehouse with about 25 machine gun weilding bodyguards around them in a circle being held up by a second bad guy named, and I am not making this up, Crime Master Go-Go. He’s supposed to be an homage to a classic Indian villain, Mogambo (Crime Master GG’s uncle). In a masterful display of costuming moxy, he wears all black, I think he has a G on the front of his chest, a red cape tied at the neck and a Lone Ranger mask. Yeah. I know. But seriously, he’s like the best thing about this movie. And the actor playing him has made 313 movies in the last 32 years. (including one last year titled “Taarzan: The Wonder Car”)

So Go-Go and his 25 bodyguards have guns trained on everyone, but somehow Salman gets ahold of a gun and points it at Go-Go telling him to drop it or he’ll shoot. So Go-Go drops his gun. Along with ALL 25 of the machine gun toting guards. The girls go around to collect the guns and the guards gingerly hand them over. TWENTY-SIX guns in the room and they all freak out about this one guy’s little handgun. And a bunch of those machine guns were behind Salman’s back. They could’ve dropped him like a bad habit before he even had a chance to run over some guy while driving drunk and kill him and then lie to the public about it! Honestly. I don’t know what the directors are thinking. So then a big fight ensues between Salman and Aamir and all the guards that involves a lot of mid-air somersaults, some falsetto “oy, ma!”s from Salman, some karate poses and some terrified looks from the girls. In the end, the police arrive, the father agrees to the marriages and all is well. Except for the viewer.

I love Bollywood movies. I do. I even have a penchant for the early, low-technical-quality ones. They’re funny and as bad as they are the actors usually do a pretty good job considering that BW scripts are often written the day they’re filmed and actors may be doing more than one movie at once so the characters are rarely well fleshed out (Karisma Kapoor made 10 movies in 1994). But when I first watched this one, before I got to intermission I had to turn it off and walk away for about a month. Susan encouraged me to persevere to the end to see the fight scene, so I did, because I normally do what I’m told. But lawsy it was hard to sit through. I’m not kidding about the awful acting. Woo. Incidently, I read that Karisma and Raveena cat fought all the way through this movie. Hee! NOT to be missed: Salman’s unbelievably gay “photo session” posing at the beginning. Wow. I guarandamntee he fast forwards through this part every time he watches this movie. And you KNOW he sits around watching his own movies.