Director: Anurag Basu
Screenplay: Anurag Basu, Robin Bhatt, Sanjeev Dutta, Akarsh Khurana, Akarsh Khurana, Rakesh Roshan
Producer: Rakesh Roshan
Starring: Hrithik Roshan, Bárbara Mori, Anand Tiwari, Kangana Ranaut, Yuri Suri, Kabir Bedi, Nicholas Brown
MPAA Rating: NA
Running time: 128 min.

(3.5/5)

I am not and have never been a great connoisseur of Bollywood but I have seen enough productions out of India’s huge entertainment marketplace to expect a few things namely great, catchy music and a handful of spectacular dance numbers.

From my limited run-ins with recent Bollywood fare, this is still the case in a few films but for the most part, the industry is changing and with it coming films that are much more action driven with fewer dance numbers. Even under this new equation, Kites seems a bit of an aberration though not in a bad way. I love a pleasant surprise and it doesn’t get much more pleasant than Anurag Basu’s action romance.

Kites stars heart throb Hrithik Roshan as Jay, a dance instruction in Las Vegas always looking for a way into the big money. Aside from his regular gig, he also scams a little on the side by marrying illegal immigrants for green cards. At one of his dance classes he meets Gina (Bollywood superstar Kangana Ranaut in a cameo roll), a young woman who is smitten with him. When he discovers that she is the daughter of a rich, casino-owning family, he pursues her advances and becomes embroiled in a family who uses mob tactics to keep their casino running smoothly. At his first outing with the family he meets Linda (Bárbara Mori), a beautiful Mexican woman who is engaged to Gina’s brother and immediately Jay is smitten. Shortly after this encounter, Jay realizes that he’s already met this woman and that months before she had paid him for a green card marriage.

In a series of ludicrous events, Jay and Linda take off together and end up in Mexico with a bagful of money and getting married, even though they can barely communicate with each other. But they’re relationship isn’t meant to be and shortly after their marriage, the Las Vegas crime family comes knocking, kicking off a final sequence of events that plays out like the most tragic of Shakespeare’s romances.

Kites isn’t just good fun, it’s great fun. There are crazy chases and big action sequences peppered with a handful of romantic, PG-rated, liaisons between the two lovers before ending in an unexpected fashion. The combination of English, Hindi and Spanish is a little jarring at first but that quickly becomes the norm as the story unfolds over two hours that seem to disappear in a flash. There’s eye candy for everyone and it’s immediately easy to see why Bollywood has become such a huge industry: the films appeal to everyone and are exactly the type of thing you might watch with your parents without feeling embarrassed.

There are few dance numbers here, just one in the opening 30 minutes and it too is more in line with something like Step Up, and the musical numbers feel completely natural in this story of doomed romance.

Kites opened in North America a week after its Indian release to box office success and I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing more Bollywood films cross the pond in the coming years and if they’re all this much fun, I wouldn’t hesitate to drop a few bucks at the theatre to see them.

Sometime after the film’s release, a second edit of the film also appeared in theatres in North America. The second film, titled Kites: The Remix was presented by, hold your breath people, Brett Ratner, and featured a cut of the film edited by Ratner’s regular editor Mark Helfrich and featuring new music by Graeme Revell. I didn’t realize this was a completely different cut of the film when I decided to see the Bollywood version but I may need to check this one out in the future to see how Ratner’s version diverges from the original.

Kites is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on February 15th.

DVD Extras: There are no extras on the DVD however, it contains both the Bollywood cut of the film (reviewed here) along with Bret Ratner’s Kites: The Remix which clocks in at just over 90 minutes.