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Aap Ka Suroor***ing
Himesh Reshammiya, Hansika Motwani
Directed by Prashant Chadda

 
With different avenues opening up for anyone who is talented enough, India's most popular vocalist has gone up against all odds and proven his worth as a bankable actor in his debut film, Aap Ka Suroor. However, bankable just proves he's popular, not good. With conflicting opinions about his being the gritty nasal or serenading voice, there can be only one opinion about his acting capabilites: they just could not get worse.

Directed by Prashant Chadha, Aap Ka Suroor is a typical Hindi flick with the usual mix of romance, slapstick humor, run off the mill dialogues and action thrown in. The movie revolves around how HR (the "acronym" used for Himesh Reshammiya throughout the film) gets convicted for the murder of a journalist and how he tries to exonerate himself of the blame solely because he wants to get married to Riya (Hansika Motwani), the girl he is madly in love with. HR plays the role of a popular singer and is therefore found crooning whatever he can at every possible point in the movie.

 
Sixteen year old Hansika fits in well and it's hard to imagine her as the same little girl who was seen in pigtails as recently as Rakesh Roshan's Koi...Mil Gaya. AKS is Hansika's first film as a leading actress and she has done satisfactory job. Malika Sherawat features as Ruby James, corporate lawyer of the company planning to sign a music contract with HR. One has a good laugh when Ruby exhibits much of her "professionalism" by posing seductively and telling HR to "Call me any time of the day…or night". This made her sound more like a bar-dancer rather than a lawyer, but then that's probably what the director was aiming for in the first place or he would have cast someone like Konkona Sen Sharma or Nandita Das instead. It makes one wonder how Veer Zaara would have ended had Mallika Sherawat been Shahurukh Khan's lawyer instead of Rani Mukherjee!

Apart from creating characters restricted to one's figment of imagination, there were also many technical faults in the plot, which once again reminded one of the bad execution of the storyline. For example, the miraculous appearance of desi auto rickshaws on the streets of Stuttgart in Germany and the inability of the German cops to catch a mere fugitive and that too a well-known singer, is rather bizarre.
 
Over to the soundtrack. AKS has been a litmus test for Himesh Reshamiyya as he has a triple role of lead actor, composer (with Sameer) and playback singer. At a glance the soundtrack bears his signature stamp, especially in songs like 'Tanhaiyyan' and 'Yeh Tera Mera Milna', which are somewhat irritating but nevertheless stick in the mind. For HR fans, they are perfect. The opening song, 'Assalaam Alaikum' and later the Zubin inspired 'Ya Ali' reconfirm that Reshammiya believes in the benefits of pleasing the gods (though definitely not while wearing a burqa). But in an otherwise decent soundtrack, the remix of the Sholay original 'Mehbooba Mehbooba' comes forth as a disaster and that too, a completely unnecessary one.
 
Apart from all the raised eyebrows, Aap Ka Suroor has done extremely well at the Indian box office and that says volumes on this one man's popularity! And HR has done his marketing right. AKS promos were intriguing, the soundtrack sounded good and the film had a feel good factor. The animated cartoon version that he churned out for the song 'Yeh Tera Mera Milna' was innovative.

More than anything, it is a well known fact that he is the only singer who usually appears in almost every video of his, even if it is any other film's song. In his determination to stay put in the eyes of the audience and in his soaring ambition to leave no stone unturned in climbing the topmost rung of the ladder, HR has very impressively churned out a boxoffice hit out of an average-business doing movie.
--Zara Farooqui

*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME