Hollywood has always caste its die on Bollywood, if not intentionally than by default. We always look for "inspiration" to Hollywood and inspiration usually takes the form of sheer plagiarism. One Two ka Four, whatever that may mean, does not appear to be guilty of that offence, to the best of my knowledge but certainly seeks inspiration from the buddy buddy cop flick, made especially popular by the Lethal Weapon series.

Arun Verma (Shahrukh Khan) is a police officer and lives in a messy loft, which he shares with his school friend Champak. His partner is Javed Bhai (Jackie Shroff) who lives with his four children but no wife. Arun does not interact at all with the kids, finding them irritating and generally more of nuisance value than anything else. However, Javed lives for his children. Cut to next scene which is a heist and we have the partners, who work in a modern day police headquarters, in open plan offices, dashing off to valiantly save the day. Heroics follow in the form of our heroes jumping off the building whilst it explodes set the scene for what should be an action packed thriller. But does it deliver?

Javed meets Geeta (Juhi Chawla) who wants to sell him some tapes but he pawns her off onto Arun. Geeta is a Haryana girl with strong Punjabi accent and around it appears more for comic relief than anything else. Yes, we know that this is going to be the course of true love but true love does take a while to develop. Javed is the senior of the two and discovers that there is someone in the police department who is mixed up with K.K.V (a hilariously awful Nirmal Pandey), a drugs baron who runs a sleazy club called the Flamingo club. On one such mission, Javed is murdered by one of the "corrupt" officers but we are kept in the dark as to his identity. Suddenly, Arun finds himself with the responsibility of Javed's four children and as he cannot bring himself to put them in an orphanage, he enlists the help of Geeta to look after the kids. Gradually, the children settle with Geeta but resent him because they feel that he could have been responsible for their father's death. However, this theme is never really developed and after one more outburst towards the children, Arun makes amends through song and all appears hunky dory. One evening, he goes to the Flamingo club and to his horror, he sees Geeta dancing on stage. He returns home to ask her why she was there only to be told by all that Geeta has been with them all day long. Could have been a hallucination as he was very drunk.

His efforts are now concentrated towards being able to look after Javed's children after they have to leave their family home. They move to Arun's "loft", filled with chickens and pigeons, obviously not a happy abode for the kids. But of course, he does not have oodles of money, as the film is somewhat at pains to show as to how little police are paid and how difficult it is to make a living. Not that we have an indication of that with Arun's smart suits, his Gucci belts etc but yes, he does not drive a swanky car but a motor cycle. Arun decides to raid the Flamingo club and steal money from KKV, which he uses to donate to a priest, and takes some to purchase a new home for the children. Unfortunately for him, someone recognises him and he is suspended under investigation. To say much more would be giving too much of the story away. Who shops Arun to the police, who murdered Javed Bhai, who was involved in the corruption, what was Geeta doing at the Flamingo club etc etc Its actually all fairly predictable and right from the start, there are no real surprises in store if you are used to the usual Hindi flick thriller.

One Two ka Four is a disappointment, a big one in fact. With its slick promos, great cast and exceptional music, one had conjured up a certain kind of film bursting with zest and energy. But Shashi Laal Nair again, as in Grahan, appears to be adopting too many tracks and then not doing justice to most of them. One Two ka four was obviously intended as a modern slick style cop movie although I have yet to come across cops like this in India, holsters on their backs, zooming around with their partners on motorbikes. Yup, it looks hep and cool possibly but Jackie, now looking quite square and portly on a motorbike is not my idea of cool. And Bollywood is far from attaining the same sort of slickness as Hollywood so all the action bits, not there is much of it, looks pretty tame and unexciting. But this modern cop flick then has to be indianised and we are introduced to the children angle, which again has not been tapped for its full potential. Kids are usually very irritating but apart from a handful of scenes, we are spared the precociousness of the kids. But although this theme has been introduced, we still do not really see the interaction between Arun and the children. There is no tenderness developed, something that a more sensitive director could easily have shown. But the director hovers on this theme with the story stretched out to show the housing difficulties, the money problems and deviates from what his film started out as, making this much longer a film than it needed to be.

The scenes developing Geeta and Arun's "romance" are also done in a hackneyed manner even though Juhi manages to raise a laugh or two The film sits uneasily between two genres, that of action pic and emotional drama. Shashi Laal Nair is not successful in being able to blend the two together, which was certainly possible. He also brings up issues of corruption but deals with it in a perfunctory manner. The revelation of the murderer towards the climax is dreadful and one feels cheated in the manner in which all loose ends are tied up in the end. In fact, by then, the thrills have all been lost and its simply a bit of action here and there. Badly written, it almost appears that the director wants to tie up the whole movie as fast as he could and it shows in the shoddy climax. The film also suffers from some rather poor editing especially in the first half thereby diluting the impact of certain scenes.

There are too many songs, which also break the flow although to be fair, the songs were a major draw for me. There are however plus points to the film. First and foremost, Shah Rukh Khan brings to his role of Arun, a certain vulnerability and sensitivity with masses of charm. He seems to have shed himself of his typical mannerisms and I would say that the film is that much more watchable because Shah Rukh really raises it to a much higher level than the film achieves. I watched Juhi and kept wondering that she has been a much under utilised actress and that there was possibly a great deal of untapped potential in her which may remain untapped. To do comedy is not easy but she is almost perfect in her role as Geeta, very funny and frankly, I cannot imagine anyone better than her. Jackie is in a short role and performs it adequately. Nirmal Pandey is simply awful and one wonders why he does roles like this at all.

The film has a brilliant background score by Rahman and the songs are excellent. The pick of the lot has to be "Khamoshiyan " by Lata and Sonu although "sona nahin na sahi", "I am sorry" and Dil ki baazi laga" are brilliantly crafted and almost on par with the lata duet. Osaka Muriaya is also a great dance song as is the title song. On the whole, you might find this fairly engaging if you don't go with too many expectations but the chances of that happening is remote.