Its been quite a few years since the release of " Kal Ho Na Ho", the movie which had completed the troika of hits for Dharma Productions and had launched Karan Johan's assistant Nikhil Advani in the director's seat. This time around Nikhil is back with "Salaam-e-Ishq" (which incidentally is his first movie out of Dharma Productions) which lets us know that he is all set to run his own show.
As this movie is the second release of Nikhil Advani as a director and as it also flaunts of a multi star studded star-cast they are many expectations in the minds of the audiences as they expect a movie which is supposed to re-create the "movie magic" displayed in the director's previous work. But on the contrary, what we get to witness is a movie which has nothing new in it and has employed exhausted story lines most of which a normal Indian movie-goer has already witnessed on screen over and over a zillion times.
The movie keeps moving back and forth between five main story tracks (Yes!! five and not six) each of which try to portray a different shade of love. The characters of each story try to depict everyday characters who are either in love, waiting to fall in love or running away from it. Each of the stories move around in different paths in their own respective circles until fate makes them cross paths at the end.
The movie falls short in many aspects be it the script, the story telling or the pace which just never seems to be fast enough throughout the movie. Though the movie makers have taken pains to provide the movie a good cinematography and have even taken care to polish their product with new graphical techniques, they have missed out upon one of the basic building blocks i.e. the screenplay on which the progress of the entire plot and hence the movie depends upon. The end result: a three and a half hour long movie with a story which has more than a dozen characters, most of whose roles aren't well figured out
The actors and actresses have tried to put up their best for their respective roles: Govinda as the happy-go-lucky taxi driver who is waiting for his "dream girl" to materialize, John who plays the role of a concerned husband as his wife is suffering from amnesia, Akshaye as the man who gets quirky before his marriage and decides to runaway from it, Priyanka who plays the role of an item-girl dreaming to make it big one day and Anil Kapoor the middle-aged family guy who is tired of his "boring" married life.
During the movie there are certain times when the audiences gets to laugh and this helps them get rid of some of the boredom they are burdened with and thus keeps them awake. Also the main song sequences are well pictorised and choreographed, so the audiences get to see the the makers aren't amateurs and are capable of delivering quality entertainment.
But despite this in the end the movie fails to gain the approval of the audiences who find no ingenuity and uniqueness in the movie and are mostly not impressed (if not disappointed) by the poor quality of the product which the director and the story writers have created. If only the right kind of treatment would have been given to the script and the roles of the characters were better framed, the movie could have done wonders.
