Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman

Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman -- Raju Becomes a Gentleman

MAIN CAST:
Shahrukh Khan -- Raju
Juhi Chawla -- Renu
Nana Patekar -- Jai
Amrita Singh -- Sapna

BRIEF PLOT OVERVIEW:
Small town boy and big dreamer Raju wants to ace his exams so he can move to Bombay and become an engineer. He passes with flying colors and moves to Bombay, where he meets the sweet Renu and eventually gets a job in Sapna's company. Before long, Raju is breezing through the ranks and is endlessly charming his lovely boss...but at what cost?

FILM -- 2/5
Oh, you obnoxious pile of cliches, where do I start? Your script is meh, as is your choreography and your camerawork, with the exception of the rain scenes and Jai's entrance. Most of the costumes and sets are second-rate, and I feel really bad for the women in RBGG: their clothes are God awful. There are some obnoxiously cheesey action scenes in this movie. I can usually handle them--it comes with the "fan of 90s films" territory--but come ON! They're stupid and silly and overdone even by 90s masala standards. The last hour or so of this movie is absolute crap. I could hardly pay attention to it during the first viewing, and I know that if I ever watch RBGG again, I'll just eject the DVD when things start getting stupid (and not in a good way). I won't deny that RBGG had a couple of sugary moments and neat touches I enjoyed, like Jai's almost psychic abilities, but other than that, I felt let down. Where's the masala charm I've come to expect and love?!

CHARACTERS -- 2.5/5
I know that movies like RBGG function mainly on cliches, and I'm almost always fully prepared for that. But these cliches work for other films because the characters charm or fascinate us, and they have a lot of on-screen presence. RBGG didn't get the message. Shahrukh Khan plays one of his many Raj characters, a naive goody two-shoes who is almost too good. This isn't his worse performance, but it lacks the charm of some of his other lover boy performances. Juhi Chawla looks lovely and plays the good girl well, but Amrita Singh often looks way too masculine to me. Both the main and supporting casts are basically made up of recycled characters that lack the emotive attractiveness of their original counterparts, with the notable exception of the brightest star in the cast: Nana Patekar. Holy crap, Nana Patekar, please marry me, you are made of awesomeness! I am blindly purchasing more of your movies, all because RBGG proved to me that you can make silver out of shit. You are the whole reason why I give RBGG's 2-dimensional characters and bland acting a 2.5/5 instead of a 1.5/5.

SOUNDTRACK -- 1/5
There's no gold here, so don't even try digging for it. There are a couple of cute tunes, like the title song, which I hated at first, then enjoyed because of its catchy saccharine sweetness. Also, the love scene between SRK and Juhi when she's in the bronze dress? Very sexy and sultry music. The rest of the soundtrack, however, is either mediocre or absolute crap; namely, I can't stand the songs between Raju and Sapna. They're so boring! Ugh!

OVERALL -- 2/5
RBGG isn't necessarily a bad movie, but it can't match up to other flicks of the same breed. While Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Rangeela, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Jab We Met, and so on and so on are also candyfloss romantic films with a healthy helping of silliness and a suspended sense of reality, they're charming, fun, and bring some freshness to the scene. RBGG doesn't cut it. The first hour of this movie is mindless fluff that I kind of enjoyed, but it's all downhill from there. I wouldn't recommend this movie to anybody, but I'm glad I bought a $3 copy of it, if only for the feel-good factor of that first hour. In the future, I'll watch it for Nana Patekar and nothing else.

TOTAL SCORE -- 7.5/20 (bad)