Despite its extreme length, like most such films the story is a relatively simple one. Twenty years after an estate claim set off a violent series of killings instigated by landowner Thakur Suraj (Mukesh Rishi), his no-good son Abhay (Rajat Gawda) becomes engaged to Dil (Gurline Chopra), whose parents agree to the marriage mainly out of fear that Thakur will kill them if don't: "Cats and dogs will feast on our corpses!" Dil's mother warns.

"Dil," we learn, is Hindi for "heart," an appropriate name as it turns out because Dil has a hole in hers, requiring major surgery in London. There, she falls in love with Indian-Brit Jeet (Jaz Pandher), a handsome singer in a mixed-race pop group called "Indian Rhythm," whose members include a white chick and a black rapper. Will Dil return to her betrothed in India? Will Jeet fool his James Bond-wannabe university professor/truant officer?

Indian Babu is such pure romantic fantasy that to complain about its total lack of logic and realism is missing the point. We know, for instance Abhay is a bad guy because a) he has poor taste in clothes; b) a receding hairline; and c) acne scars. Or Dil's remarkable recovering from open-heart surgery where, within about two minutes of screentime, she's back on her feet gyrating to the rigors of Bollywood choreography.

Still, the film offers the kind of drama that, for western world viewers unfamiliar with Bollywood conventions, may seem more than a little odd. (Mild Spoiler) The climax offers one extreme example: Though the eventual happiness of Dil and Jeet is never in any doubt, the last 20 minutes offer a surprising degree of bloodshot and Hong Kong-style martial arts, as various characters are speared, stabbed and (one would have thought) fatally shot in the chest. And while dozens of Thakur's anonymous thugs meet untimely ends for standing in the way of True Love, the principals are all smiles, if in a pool of their own blood, for the fade-out. Imagine Mapache and The Wild Bunch putting a halt their final shootout halfway through, shaking hands and resuming their fiesta, chest wounds and all, and you get a pretty good sense of Indian Babu's final scene.

Another amusing facet of Indian Babu is the main character's obsession with pizza, which is introduced in loving product-placement-type shots of a London Pizza Hut (with McDonalds prominent in the background), all of which figures into the plot later on. This American reviewer couldn't help but notice that here he was, sitting in Japan watching an Indian movie set in England with characters eating American pizza before thrashing each other like Hong Kong action stars.

Finally, the script makes an unusually high number of topical references, from the movie Titanic to Sadam Hussein and the collapse of the World Trade Center, which in this last case borders on the tasteless.

The music - outside of the extensive lifting of the John Barry/Monty Norman "James Bond Theme" - is good and the performers are attractive if not particularly good actors. When Dil's heart condition strikes and the character swoons, actress Chopra looks pretty ridiculous, like Edith Prickley with hiccups. The rudimentary subtitles, presumably lifted straight off the Indian release, are full of awkward sentences like "Clobber him! More!"

Video & Audio

Indian Babu is presented in its original 'scope ratio in an artifact-filled but watchable transfer that appears to have been culled from a theatrical print. The 5.1 Dolby Digital and 2.0 stereo mixes, both in their original Hindi, are aggressively stereophonic. There are no Extra Features to speak of save a trio of TV video promos.

Parting Thoughts

Indian Babu is maybe not the best place for Bollywood neophytes to start, but it's fairly entertaining and worth seeing. Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.