London Dreams is like many other B-wood movies – about a dream, a fantasy, and a ride that doesn't always have to have its seat bolted to any kind of reality, or in this case, believability.
If three Indians are brought together by fate, even after their lives having taken completely different paths to that point, and the singular higher purpose that binds them is a rock-star performance at an enormously popular stadium like Wembley, we need something more than a concrete structure of a stadium to believe this story – they probably need to sing in English and play music that most of the people coming there would be able to appreciate.
It is not for nothing that Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy are busy making their living in Mumbai, composing music for Hindi movies. If their music was good enough to rock the world at Wembley, they would have been doing that, instead of Mannu, Arjun and Priya.
Granted that neither of these roles are played by Reese Witherspoon or Joaquin Phoenix who would train till they could render perfect performances for a "Walk The Line", granted that London Dreams has come out of the usual pedigree Mumbai cacophony and is meant for the substantially lowered expectations of typical Hindi language cinema audiences that have been mercilessly dumbed down by B-wood. But, given the story – chasing a dream, could one be blamed for expecting more?
If a film depends on its musical numbers to stand out, it needs to have outstanding music. London Dreams doesn't. If it depends on its storyline to be noticed, it has to have a little more than two friends uniting after many years, a little better character motivation than one of them bringing the other to London, and if their friendship was the big mover, then the token girlfriend should go through an experience of her own that is a lot larger than changing hands. None of this is part of this movie called London Dreams which has had a great deal of work done in the promos and the publicity, but very little on the script, as usual.
Scene for scene, you would expect two experienced actors like Ajay Devgan and Salman Khan to easily deliver the undemanding, oversimplified love to anger range of emotions that B-wood cinema invariably spits out mercilessly on its audiences and the director ensures they don't enter any dangerous territories of challenging performances. Everybody is adequately over the top exactly as you could expect from a B movie from B-wood.
Asin's role as always, could have been performed by any girl in B-wood, and she's adequately available to the uninspiring demands this script places on her. Priya is at the centre of a great friendship gone sour, but when there is such a human endeavour in progress like chasing that elusive dream of a great live performance before a big human gathering, how can we burden her with the extra gravity of the personal?
So, the men are allowed to bring the story to its (chrono)logical end, which is rather soothing after the long drawn out indifference to the music and the story. As for the earth shattering moment that brings Arjun down to earth, we all saw it coming, for that is what happens to good guys who went down the wrong path in Hindi movies. They never give us the pleasure of telling us that they had a great time on the dark side, do they? Because they have a reputation to protect – of being ready for the next mediocre film to do the same expected things all over again.
Yet another vague, purposeless, weak kneed, over-hyped, glossed over, noisily promoted offering from B-wood, with nothing special to offer. But then, heck, you can get to see Wembley, and some of us who aren't lucky enough to be sleeping with ear plugs in air conditioned comfort after paying the money to get in, we might even catch glimpses of Paris, Amsterdam and Rome. Want a good movie from B-wood? Dream on.
PS: Sure this was written before the release of the film, as you can tell by the time of this post, but did it make any difference, really? If you've seen the film, please tell me why I should too!
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