Maine Pyar Kiya Review | Starts by Stalking the Heroine, Ends by Mocking the Audience

When you watch the first half of Maine Pyar Kiya, even though the stalking you see is extremely problematic, you sort of sense that they are planning to create an interesting thriller by blending situational humor and romance. But when the movie goes into the interval, it takes a very odd turn, which will make you raise your eyebrow out of disappointment. And to make things worse, Fazil Faziludheen’s movie starts to act weird in the second half, almost making you wonder what was the purpose of all the things we saw in the first half. Maine Pyar Kiya is a clueless movie that has a stoned script in the second half.

Aryan is a college dropout who has plans to go abroad and settle. But because of the things he did in college, he was thrown out of there, and his certificates were not given to him. During one of his visits to college to get those certificates, Aryan happens to see this Tamilian girl named Nidhi, and he falls in love with her immediately. What we see in this movie is the consequences of Aryan’s obsession with Nidhi.

I am not a fan of the idea of whitewashing stalking by making it look like perseverance on screen. In the first half, when we see Nidhi, she is presented as a girl who is caged in her own house, and the movie almost makes us feel that her parents are big people, and we might even think that her dad might be the villain of the film. But when the movie reaches Tamil Nadu in the second half, even though it is the insensitive obsession of the hero that is taking him there, the whole Story takes a different path, and the audience is literally like Who are these people? The screenplay is desperately trying to squeeze in a gangster Story subplot into this tale, and it just doesn’t work.

In the second half of the movie, where the Story mostly happens in Tamil Nadu, we have one scene where an old man tells the hero’s friends that if he had friends like them, he would have been with the girl he loved. This sentimental dialogue comes at a time when the audience themselves are wondering why all these scenes are needed for the movie. It seems like the idea of the director is to show a tale of selfless love to the audience. But the way he has incorporated unnecessarily complicated gangster rivalry confusions into this movie is just bizarre. The audience members who were laughing out loud for the dialogue humor in the first half of this movie were all staring at the movie, like What is happening? You have these unexpected cameos from popular actors, and rather than feeling wow, you are just getting confused seeing these guest appearances. Are they trying to salvage a bad script by confusing the audience?

The music by Electronic Kili has that unique feel which makes the tracks sound interesting. The sound design in some of the violence sequences, especially the one where a villain is smashing the heads of characters with a tool, felt odd. The sound almost made us feel that their skull might have been crushed, but the makeup showed just scratches. The cinematography of the action block is impressive, but the question of why such an action block was required in the first place is bothering us. The visuals featuring one particular character from Tamil Nadu had really bad footage quality, almost like they shot that entire thing on a mobile phone or something.

Hridhu Haroon, who was last seen in Mura, is trying his best to make us feel bad for the hero. But like I said, it is a problematic character, and they should have written the journey of the character properly to create any sort of empathy towards him. Preity Mukundan’s character is mad at him in the beginning for all the right reasons, and if being annoying is what he was trying to achieve, then I must say he has done a good job. Preity Mukundan plays this scared, silent girl in the film, and she was fine in the first half of the movie, which had space for her character. Askar Ali is still delivering lines at 0.5x speed. Influencer Arjun Sundharesan makes an impression in the first half along with Midhutty. But as the movie goes into this convoluted second half, all these characters are getting lost in the crowd. A bunch of actors from Tamil who are known for playing these gangster roles are appearing in the movie, just to get killed or smashed.

Towards the end of the movie, there is this fake end-credit scene, and it sort of really made me wonder whether the makers realized they made a mess and tried to cover it up with a lot of on-screen chaos. There is a beta Ranjhana thing happening in the climax of this movie. While Ranjhana managed to generate the feel factor, our hero’s selfless love Story can only induce a meh in our minds.