Bland, lazy, slow, vacuous
LOVE YATRI Director - Abhiraj Minawala Cast - Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain Rating: 0
In the second half of LoveYatri, when you have already watched over 100 torturous minutes of this bland and lazy film, its hero Aayush Sharma has an epiphany. “Ye sab galat hai,” he tells the leading lady Warina Hussain and quickly recounts everything that has happened till then. For that brief moment, he is a stand-in for all of us – the audience.
The moment passes and the rest is a trudge so vacuous and asinine that calling it “mindless entertainment” would be a disservice to the term. Aayush plays Susu, his parents named him Sushrut but the film’s director and scriptwriter must have thought that calling him Susu would be hoot.
Susu lacks ambition, a quality he shares with this film. His aim is to become a garba teacher and, after a pep talk by his uncle, to fall in love. It takes him 30 seconds—and levitation—to do the latter when he sees the pretty NRI heroine, Manisha who is called Michelle when in London. His wingmen, Rocket and Negative, and his uncle – a badly hamming Ram Kapoor – hatch an idiotic plan to push the romance along. Over a number of dandiya numbers, which are hard to tell apart, the two fall in love, only for Warina’s NRI daddy (Ronit Roy), to jump in cliché objections.
Instead of trying something new, the Loveyatri team of debutants – Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain and director Abhiraj Minawala – takes recourse in the familiar. Everything you see in LoveYatri, you have seen before. In a well-made film, it could give you comfort, in LoveYatri it gives you headache.
The one-dimensional screenplay is well supported by cringe-worthy dialogues to make this 160-minute film a war on your senses. Here’s a sample: “Love is like a SIM card. Whether the phone is expensive or cheap, the SIM remains the same”.
Throughout this ebb and flow of his love story, Aayush has the same surprised expression on his face – like he cannot believe that Salman Khan decided to bankroll the film – and Warina matches him expression-forexpression. At the end of Loveyatri, you hate nepotism as much as Kangana Ranaut. Loveyatri is a 140minute long reason why it needs to be rooted out from the film industry.