Director:  Vikram Bhatt

Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Ameesha Patel, Kiran Kumar

Synopsis: The daughter of a rich criminal industrial tycoon falls in love with a college boy. The tycoon, what a surprise, objects…

Aap Mujhe Achche Lagne Lage is yet another fifty minute short expanded to a mind-numbing three hours, presumably by the demands of the Hindi audience. Often, these Indian flicks have enough plot to make their bloated running times endurable, if not exactly rewarding in any significant way, but this dud is so light on plot that you get the feeling the makers just piled in as many musical numbers as they thought necessary to achieve the requisite running time.

Hrithik Roshan plays Rohit, an engineering student who falls for Sapna (Amisha Patel), daughter of a big-time gangster (Kiran Kumar) who pretty much keeps his daughter under lock and key. Needless to say, Dad isn’t too happy about his daughter’s new boyfriend… and that’s it. In fact, Dad doesn’t even find out about the lover’s covert romance until well into the third hour, so you can imagine just how boring the whole thing is.

Roshan is a reasonably engaging leading man (he bears a curious resemblance to a long-faced Stuart Granger from some angles, and a young, skinny Sly Stallone in others), but, as with all the parts in this sorry flick, he is given no character to work with. Rohit is a kind of homogeneous hero peculiar to Bollywood movies and no-brain Hollywood action flicks, and his introduction to the audience is straight out of one of those 90s razor ads that tried to con you into believing that by purchasing their product you would be transformed into a (clean-shaven) chisel-jawed sporting Adonis like the guys in the ad. Sapna is a bird in a gilded cage with, for the most part, absolutely nothing to do but gaze admiringly at Rohit every time he starts dancing — which he does, frequently. Perhaps, though, that’s for the best, because, when called upon to display deep, suicidal, distress, the beautiful but limited actress, Amisha Patel, simply starts wheezing like somebody in the throes of a particularly nasty asthma attack. You really do feel like handing the poor girl a nebuliser to make her feel better. The character of Raman, Sapna’s psychotic brother, is the only one that may have been even remotely interesting in the hands of a more talented writer, but Mukesh Tiwari is simply required to shout at everybody as loudly as he can. Tiwari does this with much gusto, and leaves you wondering how, in such a part, he can still overact so terribly…

Of course, this being a Bollywood movie, everything turns out fine in the end, although we have to endure one of those ludicrous finales that asks us to believe that a man left for dead — by the type of criminals you would expect to be able to tell dead from alive — is somehow resurrected with superhuman powers no less, that enable him to send men flying fifteen feet or more with a single punch.

This is a vast, vast movie with a tiny, tiny plot and no redeeming features whatsoever. A waste of their time and ours.