DVD Review: “Chandni Chowk To China”
Rating: 14
“Chandni Chowk to China” is a digitally delivered headache, a frenetic, culturally insensitive disaster in which Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar takes a scorched-earth approach to comedy, blighting all 2 ½ hours of this slapstick menace with his desperate mugging and scenery munching. No amount of enthusiasm for Indian cinema can compensate for this exhausting, painful time waster.
Sidhu (Kumar) is marking time as a lowly vegetable slicer at a roadside food stand in Delhi when two Chinese strangers claim he is the reincarnated war hero Liu Sheung. Upon arriving in China, Sidhu falls for the beautiful Sakhi (Deepika Padukone), who is on a quest to find her family origins, but Sidhu soon must confront Chinese mobster Hojo (Gordon Liu of “Kill Bill”) and his assassins, including Suzy Meow Meow (also played by Padukone).
This probably looked great on paper: a merging of Bollywood’s more manic slapstick tendencies with Chinese martial arts, but “Chandni Chowk to China” is a mess. This is not an example of a cultural phenomenon not translating to Western tastes — “Chandni Chowk” was a widely panned box office failure in its native country, as well. While much of the problem rests with Nikhil Advani’s hammy directing, most of this atrocity is Kumar’s fault — it’s like watching the worst tendencies of Jim Carrey, Robin Williams and Tim Allen morphed into one subtitled, irritating sight gag.
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“Suzy Meow Meow…”
I know a certain mutual friend who just acquired a new nickname.