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All is not well with Rajkumar Hirani’s third film. It’s called 3 Idiots but after you have given three hours of your life to it, how you wish he could have just finished the trilogy with this one and made it “Munnabhai B.E.” The B.E. stands for Bachelor of Engineering.
After making a mamu out of the MBBS-producing system, Hirani wanted to go after the system churning out lawyers of the country. “Munnabhai LLB” did happen but it was beautifully disguised as Gandhigiri. And now under the garb of Chetan Bhagat’s IIT bestseller Five Point Someone, Hirani has hit out at the country’s obsession with an engineering degree.
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So while you have the drinking sessions on top of the water tank, the stealing of the exam papers from the office and one of the three students falling for the college director’s daughter, 3 Idiots is not quite the Bhagat novel. Because the head idiot — Ranchordas Shamaldas Chanchad aka Rancho — is not a “five point someone”. He is the know-it-all college topper who challenges the system and changes the lives of everyone around him. Bole toh apun ka Munnabhai! While the book, subtitled “what not to do at IIT”, was all fun and games, Hirani’s film is more about “what to do at IIT” and is full of gyan and goodness.
But why replace Munna with Rancho and have the other two idiots fill the shoes of Circuit? Well, the answer surely lies with a certain Aamir Khan and his annual Christmas parties at the box office. What say Vinod Chopra? Are you really chasing excellence with this one and hoping success would follow or is it the other way round?
Writers Hirani and Abhijat Joshi, the men behind that brilliant Lage Raho Munnabhai script, have split 3 Idiots up both horizontally and vertically. So you have two parallel stories running — the campus life of Rancho (Aamir), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman) five years back and Farhan and Raju’s search for Rancho in the present. And then you have the two different halves — the first one designed to make you laugh and the second one to make you cry.
The laughs are there at the start but so is a strong sense of déjà vu. College freshers ragged by being stripped down to their undies, heartless director setting the strict rules, bright student of the class billed the blue-eyed boy… blame it on the reruns of Munnabhai MBBS on television. It doesn’t help that Boman Irani’s Virus, despite the Einstein get-up to give the crazy college director feel, is too close to Dr Asthana for comfort.
And then starts Baba Ranchordas’s bhashanbaazi. Initially you don’t mind it, especially the “Aal izz well” funda — dil darpok hai… usko bewakoof banake rakho… bolo aal izz well. But soon you realise every time Rancho opens his mouth, he will either send out a sermon or slam the system.
From student suicide to intra-class competition to the application of bookish knowledge, there’s “free advice” or “demo”, as he calls it, in every reel. And remember, there are as many as 20 reels in there. Rancho doesn’t even spare the girl — he advises Pia (Kareena) to leave her fiance. This one we don’t mind that much!
Back to the present, 90 minutes into the film, there is a twist in the tale going into the interval. It’s twisted enough to have you scratch your head during the break and wonder whether it’s again chemical locha at play. Unfortunately it’s something very banal, silly enough to fall flat on closer inspection. But you wouldn’t get a chance to inspect because you are already in the middle of a relentless onslaught of emosanal atyachaar. And before you can count three, 3 Idiots descends into an all-masala fully filmi climax where a baby is sucked out from the mother’s womb by a vacuum cleaner!
There’s nothing wrong with the acting. Aamir is appropriately impish. There’s only that much you can do when you have to play Baba — all puns intended — in every scene. He looks younger (not exactly a college student, though) than his last few releases and you can see the effort that’s gone into creating the sprightly body language.
Sharman and Madhavan rally around Aamir as much as they can. Unlike Rang De Basanti, this is more of an Aamir Khan film but both make their presence felt. Sharman has the more visible role but Madhavan has the voiceover narration and he does a very good job of it.
Like his last two films, Hirani’s heroine has little to do here. But with those geeky glasses and that sexy nose ring, Kareena commands every frame she appears in. She and Aamir look adorable together and the kiss at the climax is a lovely little payoff to their lovely little love story.
Omi as Chatur, the boy who challenges Rancho, makes a super debut with his hilarious lines, replete with jewels like “mutravisarjan”.
Shantanu Moitra’s music works so much better with the images, with Zoobi doobi and Aal izz well being the high points. C.K. Muralidharan’s cinematography is top notch, not only capturing the beauty of Shimla and Ladakh with elan but also making the boring walls of the college campus come alive.
Rajkumar Hirani does have the largest heart among the current crop of filmmakers in tinsel town and with his first two films he brought back the innocent magic of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Frank Capra. With Munnabhai, the movie and the message merged together to form one moving experience and the get-well-soon cards reached every home.
This time, though, the movie got over at the theatre and the message never got delivered. Because there’s a Munna in everyone but a Rancho, like in the film, is tough to trace.
