~LoveYatri Movie Reviews and BO Updates~

LoveYatri Movie Review: Warina Hussain, Aayush Sharma's Debut, Bankrolled By Salman Khan, Is Ticket To Disaster

LoveYatri Movie Review Stay away from these yatris. It is hard to feel any love for this pair of clueless lovebirds.

Entertainment | Saibal Chatterjee | Updated: October 05, 2018 10:18 IST



Cast: Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain

Director: Abhiraj Minawala

Rating: 1 Star (Out of 5)

Does love really make the world go around? LoveYatri definitely doesn't. Peddling the corny theory that Indians have been taught how to fall in love by the likes of Yash Chopra, Sooraj Barjatya and the three Bollywood Khans - yes, one character actually says that to another in a London pub of all places - this film is a litany of dour cliches. When the chips are down for him, the hero is exhorted to emulate the male protagonists of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Veer-Zaara and Tere Naam and fight tooth and nail for the woman he loves. Go, get the girl, revellers in the aforementioned bar roar in unison. The guy is re-energised. No wonder everything that the besotted young man does or says from here on, and at several other points of the film, is insufferably vacuous.

When he espies the heroine for the first time on a Vadodara Garba ground on the opening day of Navratri, he levitates and then falls to the ground with a thud, a metaphoric case of reality interrupting a reverie. This mirrors the fate of the film to a great extent with the only difference being that LoveYatri, weighed down by a lack of fresh ideas, never actually gets off the ground. Riding a rudimentary screenplay and hobbled by wet-behind-the-ears actors navigating very slippery ground, it limps and lurches from one inanity to another. A Bollywood film about young love has rarely been this dreary and unappetizing.

Sweeping generalizations flow thick and fast in a film that also seeks to impress upon us, through the words of the male protagonist, that the Garba is the source of all dance forms known to mankind. For all the pop 'wisdom' that the film heaps upon us as it follows a young man hopelessly in love but unable to evoke any empathy from the audience, LoveYatri is the equivalent of a one-way ticket to disaster.


The debut vehicle of star aspirants Aayush Sharma and Warina Hussain as well as director Abhiraj K. Minawala is a film without a story, a journey without a map. It is well known that Bollywood superstar Salman Khan has bankrolled the project to launch the career of his brother-in-law. He would have done his young protege an infinitely bigger favour had he invested some money on a genuine screenplay rather than on a wafer-thin mish-mash celebrating love in the time of Navratri in apano Gujarat.

The two enthusiastic lead actors are plagued by the same drawback: they are armed with no more than an expression and a half. Aayush Sharma wears a perpetual smile to boot while Warina Hussain wallows in wide-eyed wonder. The limited acting skills at the disposal of the two first-timers are stretched thin over a 140-minute drama that opens in Baroda and winds up in London without inching anywhere close to its destination.


The hero of LoveYatri is a Garba coach who has no interest in academic pursuits. The guy is called Susu, an abbreviation of Sushrut. Yes, that is indeed his name! His lack of ambition, held up as a sign of his free-spirited nature, is contrasted with the career-oriented ways of the heroine Manisha/Michelle, a London girl on the verge of entering the portals of the British capital's most prestigious B-school and then landing an 85,000-pound-a-year financial sector job.

She arrives in Vadodara during Navratri, her father Sameer Patel (Ronit Roy), the owner of a laundry chain, in tow. Boy and girl meet and fall in love. When the stuffy laundry man discovers what the two youngsters are up to, he puts his foot down. He takes Susu to the top of a stuck Ferris wheel to show him the extent of the heaven-and-earth class difference between him and the girl he is smitten by. A world separates my super-ambitious daughter from the drifter that you are, so leave Michelle alone, the dad thunders. The heart-broken boy goes into a tizzy.


Susu himself hastens the separation by making a nuisance of himself when Michelle takes him and his two friends, Negative and Rocket, out for a meal at a high-end restaurant. The girl stomps off in a huff and catches the next flight out of India. End of first half.

Post-intermission, a contrite Susu, in the company of his maternal uncle Rasik (Ram Kapoor), a Garba singer, is on the plane to the UK. The rest of the film is focused on the hero's mission to get the estranged girl back into his life despite the knowledge that she has a British boyfriend.


At one point in the second half, the hero reflects what the audience begins to feel 15 minutes into the film. "Sab kuch is wrong... Iss mein se kuch bhi nahin hona chahiye tha (Everything is wrong, none of this should have happened)," he says after enumerating all that has transpired between him and Michelle. If only the realization had dawned upon the makers of LoveYatri before they embarked upon the project, we would have been spared the pain of sitting through it.

Loveyatri movie review: The Aayush Sharma film is smothered in silliness

Loveyatri movie review: While you are waiting for the time to pass, and it does with torturous slowness, you ask the obvious question: if the leading man wasn't Salman Khan's brother-in-law, would an entire film be made just to launch him?


Written by Shubhra Gupta | New Delhi | Published: October 5, 2018 1:17:54 pm


Loveyatri movie review Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain



XLoveyatri movie review: Even such seasoned actors as Ronit Roy and Ram Kapoor flounder.

Loveyatri movie cast: Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain, Ronit Roy, Ram Kapoor
Loveyatri movie director: Abhiraj Minawala
Loveyatri movie casting: One star

Susu? That's a cool name.' A character addresses the leading man thus in Loveyatri.

No, it's not. It's a word which makes people, even those who've got past kindergarten level humour, snigger.


For a hero' to go through his debut film by that name with a straight face must have taken some doing. What were the filmmakers thinking? Or were they? At all?

Sushrut aka Susu (Sharma) is a Vadodara-based lad whose dream is to start how own garba' school. He loses his heart to pretty NRI Michelle aka Manisha (Hussain), and we are steered lamely towards the oldest conflict in the book: poor amiable boy, rich ambitious girl, and of course the twain will meet after two and half dreary clichd hours.

While you are waiting for the time to pass, and it does with torturous slowness, you ask the obvious question: if the leading man wasn't Salman Khan's brother-in-law, would an entire film be made just to launch him?



Silly question, I know, but what else do you expect when the film is smothered in silliness. Even such seasoned actors as Ronit Roy (the girl's papa who hates the boy's guts) and Ram Kapoor (the boy's uncle who thinks all Indians learn how to romance from the movies) flounder.

Other questions of the same nature surface, but I will spare you.

Loveyatri movie review: Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain are equally bland in Salman Khan's ode to garba


Udita Jhunjhunwala

Oct,05 2018 09:16:35 IST

Comment 0

Tweet
2/5



Cast: Aayush Sharma,Warina Hussain,Arbaaz Khan,Sohail Khan,Ram Kapoor,Ronit Roy,Pratik Gandhi and Sajeel Parekh


Director: Abhiraj Minawala



It's the ratri' (night) before Navratri and Baroda boy Sushrut (Aayush Sharma), aka Susu is ready for nine nights of dance. Described as ambitionless', Susu's simple life plan is to run a garba academy. His parents' frustrations do not rattle Susu's modest plans.


His friends Rocket and Negative are more realistic about the upcoming nine nights of revelry. They look forward to falling in love every half hour and being heartbroken every hour. Susu's mama (uncle), played by Ram Kapoor, a full-time garment salesman and a seasonal singer, is also Susu's love guru and he believes his nephew's life is going to change this Navratri. Uncle's love notes include wisdom such as love is like a SIM card it fits in to all phones irrespective of brand or cost. A smarter boy might have seen the warning signs, but then Susu is not the ace in the pack and blindly follows uncle's advice.

Enter Michelle (Warina Hussain), aka Manisha, a Gujarati NRI who comes to Vadodara from London with her father (Ronit Roy). They are on a family visit. Between clicking sticks and spinning mirrorwork, Michelle and Susu spot each other at the local garba, and it is love at first sight.

The large garba get-togethers are the highlight of director Abhiraj Minawala's Loveyatri. Richly decorated sets, vibrant costumes and energetic dancing serve as the backdrop for Susu and Michelle's fledgling love story. But every good old-fashioned Bollywood love story needs an equally old-school villain. With Ronit playing the laundry service-owning patriarch (with a chain of laundromats called Lord of the Rinse), you know he is going to throw a spanner into Susu's love story.

Niren Bhatt's script is old wine in recycled bottles, just with a new faces and a new setting. From the backdrop of the Navratri festival in Vadodara, the action later shifts to the banks of the River Thames in London. Boy chases girl, proves his worth to the unreasonable father, wins girl, and meets two sympathetic Gujarati policeman who become his unlikely saviours (Arbaaz Khan and Sohail Khan).

As the location shifts, we leave behind two of the best things about Loveyatri Pratik Gandhi and Sajeel Parekh, the actors playing Negative and Rocket. Their delightful performances swaddle Aayush Sharma, whose default setting is to hold one blank expression for as long as needed in the scene. Kapoor and Roy lift up potentially flat scenes too. Like her debutant co-star, Hussain too is bland, and this almost works in their favour as a newbie onscreen couple.

Vaibhavi Merchant's choreography, Tanishk Bagchi's music, sparkling costumes (Alvira Agnihotri, Manish Malhotra and Ashley Rebello), and Jishnu Bhattacharjee's camera bring energy and colour when it is most needed the vibrant background occasionally compensating for the lifeless foreground.

LoveYatri Movie Review: Aayush Sharma's debut film is a heavy dose of 'been there, seen that'

Entertainment

Updated Oct 05, 2018 | 14:47 IST | Amman Khurana


Critic Rating:



Here's our review of Abhiraj Minawala's musical romantic drama LoveYatri. The film marks the acting debuts of Aayush Sharma and Warina Hussain and is produced by Salman Khan Films.



If there is a cheat sheet for creating a Bollywood romantic drama involving a desi boy and an NRI girl, the writer of LoveYatri, Niren Bhatt, seems to have taken it way too seriously. For almost everything that plays out on screen during the runtime of 139 minutes of this excruciatingly tedious film is heavily injected with the been there, seen that' feeling.

Except for making a few minor alterations in this done and dusted template, Bhatt brings nothing new to the table and hands over the script to director Abhiraj Minawala. For the worse, Minawala, too, prefers playing to the gallery. Or maybe, he was strictly told by the makers to take this route.


The setup is extremely familiar. In Vadodara of Gujarat, Sushrut aka Susu (Aayush Sharma) is a Garba dance teacher who is a good-for-nothing boy in his father's eyes. Constantly under the pressure to find a stable job, this boy has a dream to open a dance academy of his own.

Cut to London in the United Kingdom, Michelle aka Manisha (Warina Hussain) is a class topper. Daughter of a powerful businessman (Ronit Roy who gets each and every nuance of a Gujarati NRI correct), her only demand from her father is a trip to India. During the festival of Navratri which serves as a colourful backdrop here her wish gets fulfilled. It's autumn and love is in the air for Sushrut and Michelle. But before their love story reaches the next stage, a misunderstanding creates a rift between the two and Michelle flies back to London.

Yes, there is a cool mama (played convincingly by Ram Kapoor) to help his bhanja get the love of his life. There are also two plain-looking friends (Pratik Gandhi and Sajeel Parakh who add spice to an otherwise dull film) of the hero, whose only job is to keep a regular check on the progress' of his love story.

Surrounded by these fantastic actors, Aayush struggles in nearly every scene that he appears in. When his job is to give a natural reaction to a dialogue, he gives a meaningless nod. In scenes that require him to overpower the other actor with fast dialogue delivery, he ends up eating his words. In a nutshell, he looks most comfortable when asked only to smile. When there is too much acting' happening on screen, a song comes to his rescue there are six in total, by the way, majority of them being dance tracks.

Warina, on the other hand, shows a lot of promise. She does falter in a few scenes here and there but overall, the newbie is pleasant to watch. Her performance in the film is rather contained, which totally works in her favour.

Even if one let goes the first half of LoveYatri, it is incomprehensible that both the writer and the director heavily underutilized the second half. There was ample scope to give the film a new life. But alas, LoveYatri never really blossoms.

Review by: Amman Khurana

Rating: 1.5 stars

Wow, people watched this and reviewed it!!!!

Aayush Sharma, whose default setting is to hold one blank expression for as long as needed in the scene

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWLPoCJxX-E[/YOUTUBE]