Lage Raho Munnabhai - Review

Good comedy, great packaging of Gandhi, a coherent narrative, a cast which obviously enjoyed itself tremendously and works well together as a team - all the ingredients of a good movie and that is what Lage Raho... is. And the best thing is that this is a movie which does not attempt to take off where the earlier Munnabhai left off. This is a separate story, with just the same set of main characters.

Ok, now to the story. Sanjay Dutt is Munna the dada and Arshad Warsi his sidekick Circuit (pronounced SirKit) who work for real estate `shady' dealer Boman Irani. Munna is in love with Janvi (Vidya Balan), a radio DJ and in a bid to meet and impress her, impersonates a history professor (Murli Shankar Sharma) and by his usual dubious means wins a quiz on Gandhi. Impressed by Murli-Munna's native gyan on Gandhi, Janvi invites him to her home-cum-old-age-home-for-homeless-elderly-people to give a talk on Gandhi. Munna spends long sleepless hours mugging up on the life and works of Gandhi and the result is that he starts hallucinating about Bapu. However, he believes that the hallucination is all for the best in facing Janvi and her troops and then of course romance blooms. Meanwhile, Boman Irani needs Janvi's bungalow as a gift for his daughter's wedding and tricks Circuit into helping him get the bungalow while Munna and Janvi are away in Goa. Munna comes back and enlists Gandhi's help in getting back his lady love's home and heart.

Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi do a great job as usual, though I thought that Boman Irani did not have too much scope here. He does do the role of the flashy Sard pretty well, but hey, Boman is a great actor. Vidya Balan does a good job too, though I did find the Goood Mornnnnnnnnnnnnnnning Mumbai a bit irritating. All the oldies are super cute. And Gandhi,of course, was very very chweet.

But I found it a tad bit sentimental in places (eg:Munna says sorry to Circuit).For instance, a movie like `Love Actually' deals with a cheesy subject like love and doesn't dip into sentimentalism. But Munna has liberal doses of it which makes it that much more predictable and very-Bollywoodish.

To sum up, it is a good fun movie, definitely worth a watch, but keep your expectations low.