There aren’t only 3 Idiots around.

Warning: Contains spoilers and my very personal, critical, slightly-lengthy opinion of the movie.

ST Coleridge wouldn’t have known that the ‘suspension of disbelief’ term he coined would find application in a different continent 200 hundred years later, in the shape of Bollywood cinema. For what else would justify the transformation of a recreational room into an OT in mere minutes, or at a more rudimentary level, passing off flabby middle-aged actors as college students?

Here’s a movie where men willingly drop their pants and recite something about a Jahapannah, any number of any-size people fit on a petite scooter (product placement takes on an entirely new level in this movie), there are regular scenes of people peeing, and very very alarmingly, the phrase ‘Aal izz Vel’ (pronounced exactly like that) is touted as the mantra of life. If you hate the word ‘anywayz’ as strongly as I do, you might understand my sentiment about the last point.

I don’t know when I began to find ‘3 Idiots’ lame and, well, idiotic. I might attribute that a bit to the professor who tells Aamir to study in an arts college in the scene where quite a hullabaloo is made over the definition of a ‘machine’. Classes are taken in hindi despite the setting being a top ranked university in the country. No wonder foreign universities I apped to asked for translation  of transcripts. Or maybe I liked Aamir’s t-shirts in the movie too much and opined that they would suit me better; reasonable cause for a grudge.

IDIOT is apparently an acronym with respect to the movie, ‘I’ll Do It On my Terms’. Ironic that the letter of the word that dictates the central theme of the movie, ‘My’, is missing in the actual acronym. It glares, especially when, to teach Raju a lesson, Rancho messes with the rote-believing Chatur Ramalingam. So where is  the acknowledgment that Chatur’s own methods work quite well for him? While I am not commenting on the correctness of either practice, I do believe there’s some sort of inherent flaw in the promotion of subjectivity.

You know the story. Three guys come to college and battle academic expectations dressed in crisp branded clothes (despite Raju’s family’s Rs 2500 monthly income issue, his ‘Fab India’ish kurtas fit him well, don’t you think?). Two of them learn life’s lessons from the third, who then mysteriously disappears. Many years later, they trace him to his address and are distressed to find Jaaved Jaffrey instead. I wasn’t. (This is a turning point in the movie — you realize why these guys were bottom of the list during college. Why else would they take so much time to understand that this dramatized confusion can be cleared with a simple explanation of impersonation?) So they kidnap the girl (not before proving the groom is still as brand-money-conscious as ever, which I understand. I would freak out too if somebody lost a 4-lakh watch I gifted them), make ample fun of the poor Uganda boy (Omi Vaidya deserves more credit than he’s getting), and finally meet Aamir Khan who does look quite Phunsuk Wangdu, so I won’t ridicule the name.

Along the way, you quite feel you walked into ‘3 Idiots’ with reasonable expectations, but are in the danger of walking out feeling like one yourself. It’s a ride that’s preachy (for a student, Rancho delivers the most lectures in the movie), not funny (scenes in the loos, drunken escapades, the balatkar-chamatkar thing lost its charm after the first couple of times), ridiculously unbelievable (the birth scene, Rancho-Pia’s separation of many years is graciously forgotten in a slap and an unfeeling kiss for which the latter comically had to stoop down), among other adjectives. And you do know the outer space pen joke is quite old, and the scene where the guys mix their exam papers with the professor who doesn’t know them was done in a much more sophisticated way here.

The movie has its good points. I would count Boman Irani’s north Indian lisp among them. Overdone here and there, but he pulls it off really well. Centimetre is as cute as his Millimetre counterpart, and the Byte dog family should seriously be in the closing credits atleast. I found the scene where both Boman Irani and Aamir toss the former’s office keys to Madhavan hilarious, and IIM-B looks as good as it does in life.  Sharman Joshi evokes ‘awww’s with his puppy dog looks, while Kareena’s hotness was equally awe-inspiring, if you are blind to her ‘Jab We Met’ hangover.

But yes, since I took more time to write the previous para than the rest of the review, I’ll stick to my dominating opinion. To me, ‘3 Idiots’ is not even as good as ‘Munnabhai’ (the latter I liked despite Sanjay Dutt, so you can imagine). I would change my mind if Rancho could whip up some technological substitute for my phone’s outer cover part, which I lost at the cinema hall. But until then, I’ll maintain that unlike the baby who kicks itself to life on hearing ‘Aal izz Vel’, I might just kick you to your death if you say the same to me.