HUM TUM!

Starring: The Times of India, and other paper tigers.

[Review written without the permission of The Times of India. The author offers humble apologies]

Karan Kapoor [Saif] is a cartoonist who creates a couple of cartoon characters - a boy and a girl - which in a fit of creativity, he names "Hum" and "Tum". Hum and Tum also feature in a comic-strip called Hum-Tum, which is published [where else?] in The Times of India [a little like the Dubyaman strip, and equally bad, methinks]. The movie begins with Karan sitting under a TOI billboard [where else?] and revealing lurid details of his love-life to a group of journos after releasing his latest book "Hum-Tum".

Allow me to digress a bit for a little dope on the characters "Hum" and "Tum" themselves: Hum is a boy with a skateboard in his hand and a half-crazed expression on his face, and is supposed to be representative of the highly flirtatious masculine side, of the morass that is humanity. Tum is a girl who acts coy, and pretends not to understand. Both of them like each other, but prefer to snort and look the other way. The similarities of the movie with real life end here.

The audience is then taken on a pan-world tour with shorts stops at Amsterdam, New York and Paris. Rhea Prakash [Rani] is on her way to NYC to study, and so is Karan. They sit next to each other on the flight [where else?] and strike-up a friendship. Rhea is as patient with Karan as one would be with an idiot child, but when Karan plants a kiss, it doesn't go down well with poor ol' Rhea. Karan is the happy-go-lucky philandering type while Rhea is not. Karan flirts with Rhea everytime they meet [once in 6 months], but she snorts and looks the other way. Karan's mother [Rati] is a wedding planner in Delhi, and beta Karan has to stand in for her at one of the weddings. No prizes for guessing whose wedding [Tall surprise element - the groom is not Karan, it's daddy long-legs Bachhan Jr. in a blink-and-you-miss-me role] it is. Rhea's mother [Kir(r)on Kher] takes a liking for dear Karan, just as one would tend to like a naughty idiot child.

But marital bliss proves pretty damn elusive for poor Rhea, and she finds herself settling down in Paris with her mother. Where, incidentally, Karan's estranged father [Rishi Kapoor] who works with the french paparazzi, also decides to temporarily encamp. Ooh. Their destinies intertwine again, and the sob story that she sniffles out makes dear Karan suffer from pangs of love and guilt, and extreme bouts of low self-esteem prevents him from proposing to her. He instead tries to fix her up with someone else, but then all's well that ends well, no?!

The music's just about okay, with the exception of the one song that's played at the opening and the closing of the film. It's an attempted rappy, bluesy, funky number, but it makes you want to rub thermocol on the wall just to relieve the pain you're experiencing in your eardrums. Saif makes his character very real and enjoyable. His sense of comic-timing is close to perfection. Rani looks good, for a change. The movie suffers from filthy rich characters [typical], lame gags, over animation [some of the bone-jarring "Hum Tum" sequences could be done away with], over acting at times, too many references to The Times of India, and too many characters and twists. For example, in the complex storyline above, I left out about half the story, and half the characters. The movie also starred Shenaz Treasurywalla, Jimmy Shergill, Isha Koppikar and am not even sure their names appeared in the credits.

Bottomline - this battle of the sexes, vexes. But one can safely watch it once.. just once!!