Dhadkan

Dhadkan is one of those complicated Bollywood love stories. Mahima Choudary fancies Sunil Shetty. Sunil Shetty fancies Shilpa Shetty. Shilpa Shetty marries Akshay Kumar but loves Sunil Shetty. Akshay Kumar loves Shilpa Shetty. CONFUSED? Let me start again.

Once upon a time there were two lovebirds: Sunil and Shilpa. They think of each other as soul mates and want to spend the rest of the lives together. However there is trouble around the corner, in the form of Shilpa's disapproving parents.

Sunil Shetty is a poor man, and Shilpa is rich (hello, isn't that what happened in Raja Hindustani)? So, in true Bollywood tradition, Shilpa has her marriage arranged to another man, Akshay Kumar. Naturally, the lovebirds are heartbroken and wonder how they can live without each other.

To make matters worse, Sunil Shetty's mother dies suddenly as well. This is the final straw and brings out shades of gray in bechara Sunil. He decides that the only way he can win Shilpa back again is to become the man that her parents wanted
i.e. a rich bastard. And guess what? He does it very easily!

This is where Mahima enters the scene to create some more masala. She loves Sunil, even though she knows that he loves a married woman. So the big question is who ends up with whom?

The film has some stunning scenery that (together with the popular songs) is quite a treat for the audience. This is definitely one of the film's strong points. The performances are also impressive, and this is Shilpa's biggest film to date. She handles the emotions of her character well, and Dhadkan will help her career enormously. Akshay and Sunil are both good too, and have matured greatly as actors. Mahima's role is not well defined, and so she doesn't have much opportunity to show talent.

The story line has many gaps, which means that the audience will be asking
questions such as 'how exactly did Sunil get rich so quickly'? This is the films main drawback. Also, the second half of the film starts to drag on a bit.

The thing with Darmesh Darshan is that it's hard to predict how good his film will be. On one scale he directed Raja Hindustani, proving that he is capable of great things. But on the other he also did Mela, which was really bad. So where does Dhadkan fit into the scale? It's just above average, which means better than Mela, but not a patch on Raja Hindustani