Movie Review: Love Day: Pyaar Ka Din

Movie Review: Love Day: Pyaar Ka Din

Rating: 2.5 stars

Quick take: Fun-filled bromance goes wrong

Cyndi Lauper had proclaimed Girls just want to have fun many moons ago. Directors Harish Kotian and Sandeep Choudhary believe that boys aren't too far behind in their pursuits of frolic. So to get a kick out of life, three guys band together and end up doing a lot of mischief. Love Day, with its tongue in cheek title, takes you on a journey with three friends. Their growing up years and their bromance is the mainstay of this film. Pity then, the writing tries to cram  too many situations and twists into too little time. This movie starts off like American Pie, then goes to The Hangover and finally tries to pull off a 3 Idiots. That's just too much ambition.

The story starts off with Sandy (Sahil Anand) and Harry (Harsh Nagar) receiving a message from their long lost best friend Monty (Ajaz Khan). The boys get nostalgic and then you're introduced to their sex-charged and vice driven childhood followed by an equally depraved young adulthood. The idea is that Monty always corrupts Sandy and Harry and makes them do things they shouldn't. They turn their college labs into brothels and canteen into a bar. When water crosses the mark, Sandy and Harry distance themselves from their dangerous best friend Monty. But when Monty sends for them again, many years later, they take the bait and set out on another adventure.  This time they might get some hard cash to finance their film. The craziness of the plot points in Love Day is both its strength and weakness. The movie serves up a healthy dose of risqué driven humour and the entertainment comes thick and fast. But the movie also tries to pull off one trick too many. Sandy, Harry and Monty have so many escapades that it becomes tough to decide what's good and what's not. This film definitely needed a tighter script.

But where the overly ambitious writing makes a meal of things, the direction has the right ideas. This is a veritable modest budget movie, so the focus is kept firm on the actors and their punch lines. Sahil Anand and Harsh Nagar do decent jobs with their roles. They're average joes who just don't have a handle on life. And the sense of nervy blunder works great for them. Monty though is a bundle of contradiction. He's supposed to be a happy go lucky guy with a penchant for bad behaviour. While Ajaz Khan gets the bad boy act bang on, he doesn't get any likeability to the role. He's too much into thug life mode and that makes Monty unnecessarily brash and rude at times.

Love Day sounds like a double entendre festival, but in reality it's not as rash as it promises to be. When the film steers clear of adult humour and focusses on three friends bonding and taking each through the travails of life, it finds its best moments. But these moments aren't consistent nor are they abundant.

The film does have likeable music and enough plot twists to give Abbas Mustan a serious complex. There's absolutely no shortage of entertainment or drama. But things get so random at times, that the film just looks directionless. Too many narrative changes happen and for no reason. Watching the three lead characters go from teen years to college life to quarter life crisis does become a bit too tedious and tiring. But if you don't mind a hotch potch of masala movie trappings, Love Day does have the audacity to engage and entertain. This is a no-holds-barred potboiler.