I knew this one was going to be pretty lame- a sort of Brit-culture Mighty Ducks- but I was quite unprepared for just how awful. Largely at fault is the script, which piles cliché upon coincidence to produce a messy mélange of other, better films. The acting, too, is dire- Keira Knightly was young and inexperienced, but Jonathan Rhys-Meyers has no such excuse, he’s simply wooden. Parminder Nagra can certainly act- she’s proven that since- but here she’s hamstrung by the aforementioned godawful script. The direction is flat and featureless, the music utterly harrowing.
But the real question is why a director like Chadha (and a number of other British Indian filmmakers) feel so comfortable perpetuating their own tedious, overfamiliar cultural stereotypes, and with so little subtlety: a character actually says the line “What family would want a daughter-in-law who can run around kicking football all day but can’t make round chapattis?”. ‘By the numbers’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: BBC2
17 Sep 2007 12:51 PM | Submit Comment
