On Screen

Sprawling, flashy, frantic, and loud, Chandni Chowk to China is
probably the Bollywood musical comedy/melodrama that will finally crack
the international mainstream market. Warner Bros. is backing the film
(its first Hindi movie), spent $16 million on Bollywood stars and
special effects, and is opening the slapstick epic in 50 countries this
week.

Fundamentally, Chandni Chowk is a Horatio Alger story about a goofy
street cook (Sidhu, played by Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar) who
leaves his stern adoptive father in Chandni Chowk—a poor
neighborhood in Delhi—for a wild-goose chase in China. It ends
with him studying kung fu and defeating the villain. (No need for a
spoiler alert: All of this is painfully obvious within the first 10 of
Chandni Chowk‘s 154 minutes.)

But the film is all digressions and frosting, a pastiche of
everything. There’s martial-arts action, movie-musical dream sequences,
Farrelly-brothers slapstick, and six out of seven standard-issue
Hollywood plots: a revenge story, a love story, a reunited-twins story,
a bildungsroman, a picaresque, and even a bit of a sex thriller, if you
count the assassin trying to kiss Sidhu with her poison lip balm. The
only thing Chandni Chowk isn’t is a murder mystery.

The film is excessive in every way, but, for all the overwrought
emotion and wocka-wocka humor (balls are kicked, noses are slammed in
doors), it never feels like too much. The bright, colorful feast leaves
you full in a pleasant, mildly overstuffed way, not a
so-full-you’re-gonna-barf way.

Kumar is charming and radiant as Sidhu, a superstitious sycophant
who plays the lottery, visits fortune-tellers, and thinks he sees the
Lord Ganesha in a potato. (If an American film played the ethnic
stereotypes this broadly, it’d start a firestorm of liberal
indignation.)

Thinking he’s the reincarnation of a great Chinese warrior, he goes
to a small village enslaved by a murderous gangster who deals in stolen
antiquities (Gordon Liu). The villagers want Sidhu to kill the boss,
and the rest is six plots bobbing and weaving together.

There’s lots of crying—real drooling-and-snotting crying,
mostly from the men—and martial-arts special effects and totally
unnecessary but unimpeachably fun musical numbers. Plus a rap at the
end, with sword-wielding vixens in yellow Kill Bill suits. And, best of
all, the setup for a sequel.

Sidhu’s going to a lot of places, including the lunch boxes and
T-shirts of kids across the world, before he returns to Chandni
Chowk.