Chandni Chowk To China – From Some Indian Place To Some Chinese Place

What happens when you inter-breed Seeta aur Geeta with The Karate Kid, you get a mish mash called Chandni Chowk to China (CC2C). CC2C presents mindless banter which is slowly becoming the hallmark of all Akshay Kumar movies. The wonderful part of this is that the audience enjoys it and the movie does well too. We saw this with Singh is Kinng, which was one of the biggest hits of 2008, and CC2C is supposed to be the first big release of 2009.

CC2C tells the story of Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), an orphan bought up on the lanes of Chandni Chowk, a place in Delhi which has a rich history behind it. Chandni Chowk has great importance for all Delhi’ites and tourists since it was the nerve center of Mughal rule and British rule. A visit to Delhi is incomplete without going to Chandni Chowk and part of Old Delhi around it.

So anyways coming back to the movie, Sidhu is a simpleton, a person who wants to get rich and make it big – quick and easy. He is kept on the ground by Dada (Mithun Chakraborty), who has brought him up as a kid, and continuously re-instates in him that his destiny is in his hands and not the hands of astrologers, tarot card readers etc. While the movie is placed in Chandni Chowk, it fails to show any points or artifacts of Chandni Chowk. Sidhu is waylaid by two Chinese strangers who believe he is the re-incarnation of a war hero, and he can rid them of the atrocities of Hojo (Gordon Liu), a Chinese Mafia king.

So on goes Sidhu to China, leaving his Dada behind in India. Deepika Padukone plays a double role almost akin to Hema Malini in Seeta aur Geeta(Interestingly Ramesh Sippy was involved in Seeta aur Geeta and CC2C). Considering that this was Deepika’s second film she was shooting alongside Om Shanti Om, she does well to essay her characters as an Indian and Chinese woman, even though her acting seems to overlap in the two characters. As Sakhi (an Indian advertisement actress for the Tele Shoppers Media), she is as expressionless as Meow Meow, her chinese twin sister. So while she gets credit for rendition as an expressionless chinese, she loses credit for being the Indian.

Overall the movie is filled with errors and screenplay guffows which are very noticeable. Like while telling Sidhu to leave his conquest for Hojo he is told to go back to Chandni Chowk (time and again), rather than India. Besides this Akshay says his age in the movie is 27 years, but you can see several strands of grey in his beard. He laughs and jokes about his Dada (Mithun Chakorabaty) being killed. He also calls his teacher and saviour (Roger Yuan), an old man, when the fact is that if it were not for him Sidhu would have died. That’s why it is light hearted movie to be enjoyed by you alone. The surprise package of the movie I feel is Roger Yuan, who plays the role of a police man, the father of Sakhi and Meow Meow, a mad man who has lost his memory, Sidhu’s Sifu (master) and a King-Fu master who trains Sidhu. The special effects in the movie are nothing worth talking about, even though there was enough scope for the same in the story.

One of the biggest losses for me was that even though the movie was named “Chandni Chowk to China“, nothing so special has been done to show both these places in their true self. Overall an interesting experience, but you would not miss anything if you just saw this movie on a DVD instead. However if you do visit Delhi, visit Chandni Chowk, not for the movie, but for the experience in visiting areas of pre-independence India.