Ishq (1998)
Starring:
Kajol, Ajay Devgan, Aamir Khan, Julie Chawla, Johnny Lever
Three words: Worst. Movie. Ever.
Wow. Holy… I don’t even know what to say, this movie was so bad. Hilariously so, but DAMN. Aamir Khan so overacts in this he makes Aishwarya Rai look like a Method actor. This is a good date movie if you want your date to resent you and think you have crap taste in movies.
Here’s the “plot”: You’ve got these two hooooorrible actors playing rich men who hate poor people. The dark, ugly one is Ajay Devgan’s father and the bald one is Juhi Chawla’s. They hatch a plan to marry their children to each other, but when Ajay and his best (poor) friend Aamir Khan run into Juhi and her best (poor) friend Kajol’s car, Ajay is smitten with Kajol but Aamir and Juhi haaaate each other. Blah blah blah, Aamir and Juhi have this love/hate relationship and then there is this utterly bizarre scene, even for Bollywood, wherein the guys follow the girls to some vacation spot and at the station, Juhi pays her driver to fail the brakes on the car and then gets the guys to go with him in the car, hoping I guess to kill them. Ha ha! Great practical joke there, stupid. So halfway to their destination, the brakes fail and the driver dives out of the car with the guys trapped in the back seat. So, get this, the MONKEY who goes everywhere with the driver and is named 007 BOND, takes the wheel and saves them from several near misses until we ultimately see them, IN THE CAR, go over a cliff and crash. The audience cheers because it thinks the movie is over.
Cut to Juhi and Kajol’s quarters at I guess the family vacation home and the driver comes in to tell Juhi that the guys are dead and will likely come back as ghosts. She freaks out, the lights go out, she hears a scream and her driver comes staggering into the room, stabbed and bleeding. More freakage, ghostly things happening, she’s screaming, and Aamir appears with his back to her, TURNS HIS HEAD all the way around like the kid in the Exorcist and speaks, then backs her into the fireplace and stabs her in the head with is jokey retractable-blade knife, thus revealing the whole thing as a joke. They didn’t die at all! Not a mark on them! Apparently Aamir is just double jointed in the neck. Everyone bursts in laughing. The joke’s on you, you murderous biznitch! She gets mad, they all make up, she falls in love with Aamir in a ridiculous scene (any person in the streets of Bollywood will stop what he’s doing and just stand and watch a scene of any kind, anywhere, even if he’s in a hurry. “hey look! Those two kids are arguing! Let’s stop and see if it turns into anything!”), the movie cut out and didn’t work for about half an hour’s worth of footage, then we cut to the fathers finding out about their children wanting to marry poor people. They try to buy them off which doesn’t work. Ajay’s father hires goons to kill them, that doesn’t work (Kajol sets the baddie’s crotch on fire which he doesn’t notice until he goes up in flames, which is totally bogus since every guy on earth knows the location at all times of any flame within 50 feet of his crotch), and when Ajay gets stabbed by a pitchfork, his father comes to the hospital and relents (of course, immediately after surgery, they put his bloody clothes right back on him, including his shoes, and he’s free to get up and walk around) (and also incidently, how come Aamir isn’t in trouble for killing the goon in self defense but Anil Kapoor couldn’t catch a break in Virasat?!) The kids get engaged. The audience cheers because it thinks the movie is over.
On the way to the engagement, Kajol and Aamir are coming from the poor part of town with a driver and Kajol’s uncle in tow. All but Aamir are kidnapped from the car. Kajol is tied to a fence and stripped and a man starts to rape her, but Aamir saves her just in time. Relieved, she hugs him. Five seconds later, they have apparently gone back to poor-town, gotten Kajol some new clothes and returned. Before they can tell everyone what happened, Ajay’s father starts a slide show of the two boys and their friendship over the years. But wait! There are slides in there of Aamir and Kajol hugging each other! She is only half dressed! It’s the scenes from the near rape that just happened FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO. How the hell did they… Okay, so someone was planted in the warehouse, took the photos, ran to get them developed and TURNED INTO SLIDES, then rushed them back to the party??!!! Listen, I’m all about willing suspension of disbelief here, but people. I can only do so much. So blah blah blah, the engagement is off. The two rich kids decide to get married. The audience knows it is foolish to think the movie is almost over and throws jujubees at the screen in protest.
Kajol and Aamir are told to leave the country and never return or they’ll be killed. But before they do, Aamir sets up a similar kidnap/rape scene with Juhi. Ajay fights him off and Aamir is arrested, but not before Johnny Lever (oh yes!), who is some kind of relative of Ajay, can take photos of the half naked Juhi being comforted by Ajay! At the wedding, Johnny shuts off the lights just in the nick of time and shows the slides so they can draw the comparisons themselves, revealing Ajay’s and Juhi’s stupidity and pissing off the fathers. Kajol’s uncle confesses he was paid off to lie and say Kajol had bad character. The couple runs to the shipyard and catches their beloveds before the ship sails. There are about 6 times when I could have sworn Ajay was about to confess his gay love for Aamir. He was much happier to see him than to see his true love Kajol at the end, I’ll tell you that. Everyone is happy. Except for the audience. And you don’t even WANT to get me started on the musical numbers. All I’m saying is, Johnny Lever in leather pants and a biker hat. That’s all. I’m done.
