Cast: Ali Zafar and Aditi Rao Hydari
Director: Anu Menon
Ratings: 1/5
Neither a good story, nor a proper site-seeing!
By Priyanka Ketkar
Love stories are allowed to be mushy, cheesy and over-the-top...to some extent. Love makes a person lose his mind but that doesn't allow a movie to be absolutely thoughtless, trackless, plotless...right? Well, go tell that to director Anu Menon whose London Paris New York is one such movie.
Nikhil and Lalitha meet at the airport... How to make them meet? Easy...let us go the traditional way, only, instead of giving her the handkerchief which the actress usually drops; let us make him give her, her fallen book. Voila! This opens a (more intellectual) gateway to the conversation. He is smitten by her but looking at her no one can tell what she feels. Well, she obviously doesn't want to get in to a relationship with a guy she barely met and whom she knows, she will never meet again, right? Wrong. She is also apparently absolutely in love with him. They part, with a heavy heart but with a promise that he will fly to New York to meet her. Yes, you guessed it right, they don't meet. But why? Well, that is a secret (don't get your hopes too high looking at Lalitha's new avatar; the secret is not so interesting). They meet, they part, they meet they part...until they live happily ever after. How, why, when, where? If you so desperately want to find that out, I won't spoil that for you, go and (try to) enjoy.
Not every romantic hero can be cheesy and yet manage to get that "aww..." from girls. Ali Zafar tries this way too hard, with his forcefully husky voice and his over-the-top expressions but he ends up irritating. But one must agree that he has a good comic sense and in the few light moments that he gives, he is definitely good (I was reminded of the good old Tere Bin Laden-days) but otherwise he is just too much of a show-off. Aditi Rao shows some spark at times, but then again her expressions are so hard to decipher and she comes across as simply another wannabe actress. But yes, the girl definitely has some potential. Ali Zafar and Aditi Rao's chemistry is pretty decent but the build up to their romance is so weak that the entire story appears to be unfounded.
As far as London, Paris and New York is considered, we barely get to see it properly. Yet, whatever little is captured, has been done beautifully. The music in the movie is also not very impressive (maybe the songs will take time to grow on us). The dialogues are very cheesy but at times they sound kind of sweet. The screenplay is extremely patchy but the editing is pretty neat. The movie is small and although it is a really senseless love-story, it at least doesn't give us a headache.
London Paris New York is like an SMS...short, quickly made as if to save on time or money and can get really difficult to understand owing to its senselessness.