Kismat Konnection - Movie Review

Published: October 26, 2009

By JENNIFER HOPFINGER

Starring Shahid Kapoor, Vidya Balan, Juhi Chawla

Actor Shahid Kapoor followed up his acclaimed hit Jab We Met (2007) with another romantic comedy that’s funnier but lacks the emotional zing of his preceding picture. Kapoor’s character, Raj, was a popular overachiever in school and voted most likely to succeed by his classmates, but five years after graduation, he’s failed to take the world by storm because he’s plagued with bad luck.

 

Raj is an aspiring architect in Toronto, Canada, and he can’t get a break. Raj and his business partner, Hiten (Vishal Malhotra), are trying to land a choice assignment—designing a shopping mall for big-shot developer Sanjeev Gill (Om Puri)—but nothing goes right for them, as usual. Raj’s confidence is further dashed by his old college nemesis, Dev (Manoj Bohra), who keeps rubbing his failure in his face. In addition to his professional floundering, Raj is the victim of constant, random mishaps that would drive anyone mad. Out of desperation, he visits a fortune-teller (Juhi Chawla), who tells him to look for some kind of lucky charm to turn things around for him. Sure enough, he meets Priya (Vidya Balan), and his fortune starts to change. He doesn’t realize the connection at first because she seems like another source of problems for him, but their confrontations keep inadvertently advancing his career.

 

Priya is a tough cookie. She’s a social activist who runs a community center that’s going to be demolished to build the shopping center Raj finally gets chosen to design, and he can’t figure out how to be true to his good-luck charm and complete the job of his dreams. So he resorts to lying to her—promising her that he’ll help her save the center—with the hope that he can sort it all out later. In the meantime, he makes sure she finds out that her fiancé, who wants to whisk her away to Australia, is a cheat.

 

There’s little sense of underlying attraction in the prickly interactions between Raj and Priya, and when he falls in love with her, it isn’t very convincing. Kapoor does his best to pull off the pining lover—his specialty—but there’s no magnetism between the leads. Still, it’s a charming story about surrendering to the whims of fate.

Kismat Konnection is rated Worth Watching.

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