Kites

Rating : 4/10
Release Date : 21st May, 2010
Time : 130 minutes
Director & Co-writer : Anurag Basu; Writers : Robin Bhatt, Akarsh Khurana, Rakesh Roshan; Music : Rajesh Roshan
Starring : Hrithik Roshan, Barbara Mori, Kangana Ranaut, Nick Brown, Kabir Bedi, Yuri Suri
Some lovely scenery, an even more lovely Barbara Mori (dressed in appropriate clothing throughout the film) and a good looking hero cannot mask an extremely weak, formulaic & flawed storyline that fails to sustain your interest throughout the film


Hrithik is a dance teacher in Vegas. Chasing money, riches. Even does green card marriages with female immigrants to make an extra buck. Has the good fortune to have an extremely rich heiress, Kangana, fall head over heels for him. And the family accepts him unconditionally as well. All is smooth till Kangana’s brash and brutal brother arrives on the scene, with his fiancée, Barbara Mori. And she & Hrithik cant keep their eyes of each other. They run away with the family hot on their heels, and, well, what follows is too predictable to elaborate.



I'd always been told that love is blind. Didnt know it was foolish as well. Hrithik / Barbara, even if they wanted to elope, did everything pretty much the worst way possible, almost wilfully putting themselves and their well wishers in harms way. The editing didnt work as well, I found the flashbacks / intercut with reality distracting. What does work is the cinematography, with some lovely landscapes, beautiful parts of Mexico / USA hitherto unseen in Indian cinema (for whom USA has pretty much meant New York and autumn leaves).


Why with all the resources at their disposal we couldn’t get a better story really baffles me. If you watch the promo’s and the song videos, you’ve literally seen all the fun moments between the lead pair. Why, when you have a lead pair with good chemistry, you’re not showing them having fun, interacting, sparking off each other is again beyond me. Instead we get to see them trapped in one incredible situation after another, some silly stunts, some blown up cars, a raging, vengeful brother who’s almost psychotic. And that, pretty much, is that….




There was a very apt ad before the film, which showed classic sequences like the ‘dhal gaya din, ho gayi raat’ song and the ‘maine pyaar kiya’ pigeon sequence and then asks us to abandon the age old formulae and go for something new, like Vivel soap. Wish the makers of Kites had done that as well, in terms of the story they used…