Oh, brother. Where do I begin here?
I really came down hard on the movie Duplicate back in August - I trashed SRK's performance on both the Babloo and the Manu sides of his dual role. In fairness, I was so put off by this skeevy little tongue thing that the Manu character did, I had a hard time concentrating on the rest of the film. Plus, I watched the utterly delicious Main Hoon Na the same day, which skewed my view even further. But, here's the thing: a couple of people in the BollyWHAT Forum gave it rave reviews. Not all, mind you, but a couple of people whose taste has tended to mirror mine. A second thing happened at around the same time: I pretty much ran out of Shahrukh Khan movies on Netflix and forced myself to start branching out into other actors' work. I saw a couple of movies by Ashkay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan and thought to myself, "These are actually pretty cute." A good number of those movies had received a "flop "rating, and I thought, "This might be my genre – the stupid movie." So I put Duplicate back on the queue and added Hello Brother. Both movies showed up the same day.
Now, remember - I understood going in that these movies had been rated "flops" when they came out about a year and a half apart, in 1998 and 1999. The movies had much in common: crude humor, silly characterizations, a whackado plot line, and a dastardly villain role. But now, after seeing many many Bollywood films from this time, the difference is undeniable: where Shahrukh Khan plays even these idiotic characters (and they are stupid: I am not budging from that position) with a lovability that is hard to resist, Salman Khan simply seems ridiculous. Plus, the dancing is sort of half-assed looking, as so much of Salman Khan's tends to be. Here's the bottom line: Salman Khan is meant to be an action hero.
Here's the other problem with Hello Brother: Arbaaz Khan, Salman Khan's real-life brother, is bad in this movie. I'm not kidding - he's really awful. He's trying to play the tough cop role that Salman should be playing, and everyone who's watching knows it. Even Rani Muhkerjee, who I love, can't save Hello Brother.
Back to Duplicate. How I hate being wrong. I wanted to hate this movie again, so much. But, here's what happened: I got over the tongue thing (mostly, although-ugh). When I did, I realized that a lot of the movie was actually pretty fun. Shahrukh Khan's characters are still pretty ridiculous in the movie; but, I realized after watching some other movies that he was probably intentional about it...along the lines of Leslie Nielsen in Airplane. And so, through that lens, SRK sells it. The dancing in this film has that joyful exuberance that typifies Shahrukh, which makes up (for the most part) for many of the film's defects.
A couple of points on which I should be clear: first of all, I am an unashamed, unapologetic SRK fangirl. If it comes down to a comparison between Shahrukh and Salman, for me there is no contest. Second off, I have certainly not decided the movie Duplicate is some fantastic film that everyone should go see.
But, even with all that, I feel I'm not steering you astray when I say that as crappy movies go, I'm going to have to rate Duplicate way, WAY over Hello Brother.
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