I tried to understand the raison d’être of this film or whether there needs to be one at all. Why would anyone put together a film like this with nothing new to say or relevant to add except for the rousing climax which is by all intents and purposes, facile and utterly preposterous if somewhat unconventional which does not fit the style of this hideously formulaic film.

The film starts with the premise of two warring families, one Hindu and one Christian. Being best friends for most of their lives, living opposite each other, there is pure hatred on both sides because their respective progeny eloped and married outside their respective religions. A letter arrives telling both families that the offspring of that doomed union is arriving ostensibly to try to bring the families together. Raju (Anil Kapoor) arrives with sidekick only to be rejected by both households. All efforts to bring the families together fail when we have the arrival of his “wife” Banto Betty (Shilpa Shetty). Raju is foxed at this as he is not married having told the families that he is married. So who is Banto Betty. After some pathetic comedic interaction , all is revealed. Banto Betty is the actually the daughter of the runaway lovers and demands to know what Raju is doing here as he is clearly not who he says he is. We enter flashback zone and have an obese looking Raju who is in love with Florence (Keerti Reddy). Intent on “being good enough for her”, he embarks on losing all his weight and arrives at a party given for her where she reveals her fiancé. Fate has a funny way of repeating itself. They are both from the warring families and obviously have the same issue as their uncle and Aunt had respectively 27 years earlier. Rather than marry on the quiet, Raju insists that he would try to bind the families together and have them bless this union, hence his pretending to be the child of that union.

Buoyed by his noble intentions, Banto Betty decides that she will assist in bringing the families together although you would imagine that she would seek to do so herself as both the warring families are her relatives. But she shows no real inclination with regard to this but continues to help Raju, obviously having fallen for him.

Satish Kaushik manages to churn out a dire piece of rubbish this time after fairly passable efforts in the past. What was he thinking? And the whole episode of Raju being grossly overweight is simply a silly gimmick to get some laughs going where there are none. The whole film is a mishmash of films from the past and has many similarities to Kuch tum Kaho kuch hum Kahen which follows the same thread. Like that film, this film also collapsed and quite rightly so.

Anil Kapoor makes no impression in a pathetic role and as a Eddie Murphy lookalike in from the Nutty Professor, he is simply ridiculous. If one is expected to believe that this is a man who sacrifices everything for his first love and if that is what the director is expecting the audience to empathise with, then he is way off the mark. Quite clearly, this is a just a silly crush on the first girl who has looked at him as a person and not just a fat man! And no where along the line does she ever seek to show that she is even remotely interested in him except as a friend. Shilpa Shetty is just about bearable. Keerthi Reddy is shrill and simply disastrous, lacking charm and any hint of talent. The rest of the brood hardly have roles to talk about. Anu Malik does provide one with a couple of fairly decent songs like the title song and “raag ban kar” but Alka Yagnik will probably shatter windows galore with her high pitched rendition of meri zindagi main...A colossal waste of time and certainly nothing to celebrate here.