3 idiots

Bollywood's audiences clearly demand much more than just their money's worth: in addition to frantic action, sentimental romances, family values, epic song-and-dance routines, luscious colour schemes and superstar actors, they expect long running times. Which are really necessary to accommodate all the aforesaid prerequisites. Bollywood certainly fulfilled their needs with 3 Idiots in 2009, and its audiences rewarded the comic caper with record box office receipts, at more than US$75 million gross (ten times its production budget).

It's not just a good buddy movie, about three room-mates at a top engineering college. It's also a road movie and a rom-com, in which the irreverent lead character (superstar Aamir Lagaan Khan) hits it off with a soignee medical intern (Kareena Kapoor) whose frizzy-haired arrogant father is the college's director (Boman Irani). And it's a nerd saga, with a materialist college rival discovering the true meanings of science and success when he tracks down his nemesis a decade after college.

The six grandiose quick-cut musical set-pieces are above-average smile-inducing sequences of movie quotations from Hollywood, Bollywood and classic romances. The aerial location work in Simla and Ladakh provides wide-screen delight, and the ageing lead actors convey youthful elan and silliness with the winking stylishness of vintage Cliff Richard movies.

Technically, however, the movie is light years ahead of Cliff and Carry On comparisons, as are the plotting and dialogue. Credits go to young story creator and editor-director Rajkumar Hirani and veteran screenplaywright-producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who'd previously won many awards and big profits for their two Munna Bhai comedies (starring Sanjay Dutt).

At almost three hours, the movie is never boring, with excellent subtitling that enables non-Hindis to appreciate the local comic touches, even the wordplay in a hi-falutin Hindu speech delivered by a Pondicherry-educated ex-Ugandan Indian. It's also cheering to see a film in which India is presented so positively as an aspiring society overcoming racial, religious, gender and caste issues, its everyday language decked with English-language expressions and liberal thoughts.

There's some astonishing coy homo-erotic campness, including chorus-lines of engineering students in non-sexy underpants whose rears are lowered, animated sperm, running jokes featuring farts, and levels of tear-wrenching super-strength schmaltz no old-style Hollywood mogul would have ever dared to produce in so many bucketfuls in so many sub-plots.

This is the sort of musical comedy that Hollywood used to make, on a much smaller and less cerebral scale, set in West Coast campuses and beach resorts. No one's still making such Grease or Xanadu clones in the USA, except Disney for the pre-teen market; the adult version has been outsourced to India, where it's done very well.