Movie Review: Zara Hatke Zara Bachke

Michael's Movie Grade: D-

A messy and farfetched comedy drama from India

This film's story involves a couple, who gets a divorce so the wife can be eligible for a really nice house, then they plan to remarry once she has said house. If this sounds too much like a simple sitcom plot to hold together as a movie that is almost 2 and a half hours long, that is because it is. This type of story can work very well within a time frame of a half hour or so, but when you add two hours to that, it is simply much too slim of a story. It tries to pad this out with subplots that feel underdeveloped, many unbelievable plot complications, unfunny comedic bits and very repetitive plot points. To make matters worse, there are many times when this movie actually asks us to take this farcical storyline seriously. It doesn't help that there are many times when there is simply no logic behind major plot points. Many of them just make you wonder what the characters were thinking and if they were actively trying to make things harder for themselves. A lot of the family drama especially makes you question what kind of internal logic these characters actually have as so much of it is caused by our main characters for reasons that make no sense to anyone actually watching this film. This also makes the characters often seem incredibly unlikable and leave us to where we don't care about the main couple in a romantic movie. There is a tiny bit at the end which seems to try to make these characters seem like good people, but it simply comes much too late. This film is also filled with unfunny humor. There may have been a couple moments that made me giggle, but they did not make up for how painful many other comedic moments where. This is one of those movies that seems to think that the louder and more obnoxiously a character yells the funnier the joke is. Sadly this is not the case. The music and sound effects are also often too on the nose during the comedic moments, as if they are just obnoxiously telling us what is supposed to be funny. This is an annoying habit that can even easily kill a good joke (not that there are many of those here). 

Even the two leads giving good performances and a couple jokes that are decent, are not enough to make up for the many flaws of this movie. 

  If you want to watch a romantic movie from Bollywood, you can do much better than this film.