Kites Movie Review

Kites Movie Review

Review by San Francisco Chronicle

Romantic musical drama. Starring Hrithic Roshan and Barbara Mori. Directed by Anurag Basu. In English and in Spanish and Hindi with English subtitles. (Not rated. 130 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)


The Bollywood film “Kites” is being released in two versions. Here in the Bay Area, we’re so cool that we’re getting the original 130-minute version. In other parts of the country, they’re getting a 90-minute re-edit called “Kites: The Remix.” I saw the long version, and it doesn’t feel in any way stretched or dull. It tells a simple story – an almost archetypal story – but it does so with a lot of passion and technical sophistication.

In its editing (fast) and its psychological penetration (shallow), “Kites” has the feeling of a rock video, with time set aside for spoken interludes. People talk for a bit, and then there’s singing on the soundtrack, and we see the characters going about their business. For minutes at a stretch, we don’t hear what’s spoken, just the singing, and yet the story doesn’t stop moving during the songs. It keeps advancing, so there’s none of that start-and-stop quality that you sometimes get with screen musicals.

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Review by Los Angeles Times

A romantic adventure set in Las Vegas, the Southwest and rural Mexico, “Kites” has been given the no-holds Bollywood treatment by producer Rakesh Roshan and director Anurag Basu. In its telling, the love story draws from westerns, musicals, film noir, chase thrillers with stunts so preposterous they verge on parody — and it gets away with everything because of Basu’s visual bravura and unstinting passion and energy.

The film is free of both subtlety and irony, and it demands of its charismatic stars, Hrithik Roshan and Bárbara Mori, that they act their hearts out with the utmost sincerity. The result is an exhilarating escapist entertainment that plays out like a violent and floridly poetic allegory.

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Review by The New York Times

On the whole, American audiences remain stubbornly immune to the charms of the Bollywood romance, a fact that “Kites” is determined to change. A carefully calibrated assault on resistant international markets, the movie harnesses English, Hindi and Hispanic talent to an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink plot, replaces dancing with explosions, and choreographers with stunt specialists. The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably won’t even notice the corn.


Set in Las Vegas and Mexico and unfolding in three languages, the story follows two gold-digging immigrants engaged to siblings from a powerful Vegas family. J (Hrithik Roshan) is a dance instructor and husband-for-hire; Natasha (Barbara Mori) is a terrified Mexican illegal needing a luxurious place to fall. But J’s limpid hazel eyes and smoking body will not be denied, even if it means dodging a posse of hired killers and an avalanche of special effects.

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