Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya, (2005)

Check your brains at the door, please – you won’t be needing them for David Dhawan’s latest mindless comedy. Dhawan’s films are silly to the point of stupidity, but they never make me laugh like Indra Kumar’s similarly stupid films do. I think it’s because of the characters – I never quite get attached to the characters in DD’s films the way I do with IK’s characters. Dhawan often takes a hero who is significantly flawed, whereas IK’s characters are as good as gold who just find themselves in awkward, compromising situations.

Case in point – Sameer (Salman Khan), a doctor who lies to women about being married in order to avoid commitment (this fact isn’t revealed for a while in the film, so if you didn’t know this going into the movie, you’d probably be very confused for the first half an hour). This backfires on him when he really falls for Sonia (Katrina Kaif, who I’ve never seen in a film before and never plan to see again), who insists on meeting his fake-pretend wife before their fake-pretend divorce so Sonia can marry Sameer with a clean conscience.

So where does Sameer look for a fake-pretend wife? He doesn’t look very far – his nurse Naina (Sushmita Sen) would be perfect for the role. Things quickly get out of hand, however, when Sameer has to invent other fake-pretend family members (fake-pretend children, fake pretend wife’s boyfriend…) and his slap-happy mother arrives just in time to stop the fake-pretend divorce from going through the fake-pretend court. Taking her fake-pretend bahu to be her real bahu causes complications for all concerned.

The comic relief is neither comical nor relieving. There’s Sonia’s neighbor, Pyare Mohan (a clear reference to another, previously reviewed film), who develops a crush on Sonia and makes both the doctor’s and the viewers’ lives miserable. Then there’s Arshad Warsi in a pointless, thankless role, and Rajpal Yadav, whose flirtation with Nurse Naina is genuinely funny to me because she's about twice his height.

The songs are all pretty forgettable. It seems that the one common tie they all have, however, is that for the most part they have stupid English lyrics – “Wanna spend the rest of my life with you, o sanam” or “This angle main hain triangle,” or “You’re the one for me, o jaana you’re mine” or, if your English vocabulary is limited to two words, you can sing along with “Just chill chill, just chill chill, just chill chill, just chill.”

At the end of the movie, though, I could have cared less who ended up with whom, as long as the movie itself ended soon.