Movie Review- Prem Ratan Dhan Payo

~Prem Ratan Dhan Payo~

    A certain guy A is the fiance of a girl. But this guy A either is killed/ is somewhere else far away from the girl for the time being. So another guy B steals the identity of this guy A, enters the life of that girl and makes her fall in love with him in the limited days before the guy B comes back. Eventually the guy A returns, leaving the guy B disappointed and the girl confused and angry. After the beans are spilled in the end, the girl ends up marrying the guy B because “he gave her a forever within the numbered days.”

Doesn’t this storyline ring a bell in your mind?

Which was the first movie that you thought of when you read it?

Was that movie was one among them-

1. Rehna hai terre dil mein. (2001)
2. Raja aur rank (1968)
3.  Who rehne wali mehlon ki (tv show by rajshri productions, 2005-09)
4. Kaho na Pyaar hai (2000)

Haha don’t worry, even if you thought of some other movie or tv show, no issues. You still could have hit the bull’s eye, because this storyline has been followed hell lot of times in bollywood.

And what’s more? It has been used in Prem ratan dhan payo too. :)

(Well there’s Rab ne bana di jodi too where the hero is so desperate to gain his heroine’s attention that he introduces himself as some other person to the heroine by altering his own looks and personality inorder to make her fall in love with his original self. That’s like the reverse of the above mentioned storyline :P)

Coming back to the main topic-

   Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is essentially an adaptation of Mark Twain's 'The prince and the Pauper'. The movie starts off with a song in Prem’s (Salman Khan) performance who plays the narrator in his own directed play based on Ramayana, fondly named as ‘Premleela, ramleela.’ He is shown madly in love with princess Maithili (Sonam Kapoor), only to realise later that she is supposed to get married off to some other guy who is a king. This king happens to look exactly like Prem, albeit a little moustache. It is only and only because of this stupendous coincidence that Prem makes her fall in love with him. Now take note over here people- It takes a real gifted person to have a luck like that, where God personally sees to it that the universe conspires itself according to your wishes. This can happen only with Prem, not you.

     Sonam Kapoor has acted well for a change; her character looks convincing. Her acting was refreshing, maybe because she worked with Sooraj Barjatya for the first time. That was not the case with Salman though. It seemed that memory of that ‘innocent looking Salman Khan who always played the younger brother’ in Barjatya’s films in the 90s, hadn’t left his memory. As a result Barjatya has tried to portray him in the same way in PRDP, and that looked quite unsettling. 

         PRDP looks a lot like a Sooraj Barjatya film. There's primary focus on family relations, 6 songs are covered in every 5 minutes (exaggeration), one among those songs being dedicated especially to food, and many more facts like that.

       Overall, PRDP looks like Barjatya wanted to make a movie which would keep in line with today’s times, but he also wanted to bring back the period of 90s. Barjatya wanted to keep intact the flavour of the Rajshri Production style of movies, but at the same time he couldn’t help but get influenced by the contemporary style of movie making. That mix-up just didn’t work. If only he would have stuck to his original style of thinking and content, without getting influenced, then MAYBE the film could have worked out well.

          I would say that the movie is a good entertainer; definitely watch it when it airs on Zee Cinema. (because it is not really worth your money.) 

          I would give it a 2/5 star.

FUN FACTS-

  1. It could be that during the shoot, Salman couldn’t feel the heat while doing romantic scenes with Sonam Kapoor in the film. And so, Barjatya made her dress up exactly like Aishwarya Rai in the movie hum dil de chuke sanam. It did bring in the heat. *grins*

2. It doesn't end over there. It seemed as if Salman was equally uninterested for promoting the film too. So Barjatya took inspiration for the posters of the film from some legendary scenes in the movie hum dil de chuke sanam-

These are just cheesy assumptions, I might say. But you never know.. *smirks*

                                               Fin.