Ramaiya Vastavaiya Hindi Movie Review

This is about spoilt coconuts and cow dung. It is further about how practice makes a man imperfect. It is also about terrakota horses and laughs about guys urinating on another. It is about messing up with Nuvvu Ostanante… and in a rather contrived manner establishing the credentials of Sid as an actor and about how translations can get lost in the context of changing milieus. It is also an awful debut for an actor who seems to have rushed to acting without honing his skills. Prabhu Deva is over the hills loud to a fault and is obviously carrying his luck as the remake maker too too far.
To the uninitiated it is about a millionaire couple Poonam Dhillon and Randhir Kapoor from Australia. The couple are at logger heads and she is projected as the shrew. Their spoilt brat son Ram (Girish Taurani) comes to India for the wedding of his cousin, the daughter of Mama (Satish Shah). The gal has a friend Sona (Shruti Hasan) a glam doll tucked away in the village with a brother fixation. The flash back has it that the siblings Sona and Raghuveer (Sonu Sood) were orphans early when mama dies of spousal rejection. Cared for by the local station master (Vinod Khanna) and exploited by the local Lalaji (Govind Namdeo) the siblings over do their commitment bit.
Now at the sets of Sooraj Bharjatiya (read family wedding) the hyper Ram and sober Sona fall in love. But Mom – the – Terrible (Poonam) wants her son to marry rich and silly bimbo Dolly (Pankhuri Awasti) with a crazier dad (Nasser) to boot. The rich poor divide read alongside rural urban fracture finds Ramu in the village with the challenge thrown at him by Bhai looking Bhiaya Raghuveer. Of course everyone in the audience which includes the wailing three year old knows that Ram is going to win. You also have the customary village Lalaji and his stupid son who want Sona in the family. If all this were not dumb enough, you have this character whose only role in the film is to drop whatever she is holding on hearing the word Sambahal ke.
The film is simply out of gear and loud to a fault. The Telugu version was not just a big hit but also pleasant on the eye. This is not. This time it seems too contrived and in any way while the original worked largely because of Sid, Trisha and the support cast including Prakash Raj, the replacements simply lack the wherewithal to carry the narration with any degree of conviction. While Randhir looks faded, Poonam Dhillon continues to be the non-actress she is. Shruti who seemed to be coming into her own is a mess yet again. She is simply too excogitated. The major failure in the film is its central character Ram played by debutant Girish who obviously has made it this far thanks to Dad. Money bags can help with a good launch but the deliverables and with the actor and here the lad is unpretentiously wanting. A six pack and nimble foot do not an actor make. Vinod Khanna is his usual dignified self. The one guy who is worth noticing is Sonu Sood who is not the evil he is often made out to be, but yet ends up in jail. He does a calm and under played loud in an otherwise olud chaotic world. Ramaiya Vastavaiya is better titled Ramaiya Ravodiya.

L. Ravichander.