Film Review: NAMASTE ENGLAND

Genre: Drama
Rating: 1.5/5
142 minutes
Director: Vipul Shah

Arjun Kapoor’s droopy eyelids and drowsy demeanour might not be the only reasons the viewer would have snoozed halfway through the film. No fewer than eight jarring songs have been sadistically inserted as timely alarms, lest the paying viewer enjoy his slumber.
Fittingly, the film opens with Durga Puja celebrations, where Param (Kapoor) gives Jasmeet (Parineeti Chopra) the glad eye. A few scenes later,  career-oriented Jasmeet is besotted with Param. Marriage is within sight but her Dadaji extracts a vital condition from Param’s father — “Beti shall not work after marriage: the primary duty of females is to beget children.”
Circumventing this commitment seems to be the only premise of ‘Namaste England’, the follow-up to the reasonably successful Akshay Kumar-Katrina Kaif 2007 starrer ‘Namaste London’. Peppered with patriotic cliches, the lead pair end up in London — both by different routes and designs.
Namaste England is a mishmash of a screenplay, an aimless story and laidback performances — taking away from what could have been some reasonably pleasing sights and sounds of Europe. Dialogues such as  “- – – affair is not with a male, but with a city” evoke unintended guffaws. When Kapoor is naming the Abbey, it suspiciously sounds ‘Westminister Abbey’.
At least five of the songs are superfluous and the direction mostly seems to be clueless. Towards the end, after a long drawn-out monologue, Param asks “Iska matlab kya hai?” This question may as well be posed by one of the writers (Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah) to the other.