London Dreams – Movie Review

Hail, Salman! Hail! Age may have caught up with him and he may be a little over the hill to play a rock-star, but one cannot help loving his goofy, gross, and womanizing Manu. Playing a yokel from Punjab, Salman Khan does what a young Dharmendra would do today. His Manu in London Dreams is a Punjabi munda who sleeps around with women in his village, has a lot of creditors knocking on his door, plays in a wedding band, and goes behen ke takkei in every next dialogue. It’s a role that would have suited no other star better (except Akshay, perhaps). And Salman rocks, and puts life into ‘London Dreams’.

The movie, in itself, isn’t bad either. Spiced up with racy humour from start to end, it packs in fair enough laughs but not enough musical thrill that is to be expected from a film of this genre. The culprits are Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. The trio fails to repeat their Rock On magik when they ought to have, in fact, bettered it. So when the concert songs are played in the film, the music doesn’t make your hair stand on end. The average tunes take the steam out of the plot because the band in the movie is supposed to be a crowd-puller that manages to get the Wembley Stadium packed to the rafters.

‘London Dreams’ tells the story of two friends Arjun (Ajay Devgan) and Manu (Salman Khan) from a Punjab village. True to his name, Arjun has been singularly devoted since childhood to just one aim in life – a musical concert at Wembley stadium. Manu, on the other hand, loves to have fun; he’s got talent but little ambition. He’s happy playing in a wedding band in his village and warding off a bunch of creditors with false promises. The friendship takes a new turn when Arjun takes Manu to London to be a part of his band London Dreams which includes two young blokes from Pakistan (played by Ranvijay Singh and Aditya Kapoor) and a sweet-smiling south Indian girl named Priya (Asin) who dances at the band’s concerts.

When Manu begins to emerge as the scene-stealer at the concerts and also wins the love of Priya, whom Arjun silently loves, the latter sees his dream crashing because of his dear friend and decides to ruin Manu’s musical career.

‘London Dreams’ could have done better without the overplayed drama in the second half. Ajay Devgn’s outburst at the Wembley Stadium in front of 90,000 people is overdramatized, and one can’t understand why Ranvijay would willingly conspire with Devgn against Salman. Asin’s character too isn’t properly fleshed out. Playing an Iyer girl from a conservative family, she does pretty little than dancing on stage or rebuffing the flirtatious Manu’s advances.

The silver lining, however, comes from Salman Khan who does justice to the funny and risqué oneliners given to him. Take, for instance, Manu’s flirtation with the airhostess when he sits in a plane for the first time. Or his antics at the elite parties.

Vipul Amrutlal Shah manages to pull off a relatively big production feat in ‘London Dreams’, but his direction and telling of the story is still slack. The film unspools well until the intermission but starts to weigh heavy half way into the second half. Ideally, the drama should have ended at the Wembley concert but the director stretches the story back to Bhatinda. Ajay Devgn is good as the brooding, seething, simmering Arjun, but it’s Salman who walks away with the claps, not just in the film but in theatres as well.

Watch it for Sallu.

Rating: 6/10