Director: Kunal Kohli
Geeta is a very staid name for an angel. But it seems to suit Rani Mukherji’s plain vanilla ‘pari’, who roams the blue skies with a flutter of her wings, and backchats a white-suited, pink-cheeked God.
Her mission on earth is to create a connect between a super-busy, brusque businessman and four orphans, which she aces with a little help from her celestial pal.
Ranbir (Saif) is handed the kids, fresh from the trauma of the accident which killed their parents, to clothe, feed, and love. He manages the first couple of things with a flick of his platinum credit card. Get them whatever they want, he orders his girlfriend (Amisha). It’s the last commandment he falters over: love, what’s that?
Kunal Kohli’s latest helps shake off our lousy memories of Saif and Rani, who, armed with two kids and dog, graced one of Yashraj’s cheesiest movies, Tara Rum Pum, last summer. This time around, the same lead pair has to contend with double the number of children, an equally fluffy dog, and a hamster.
And inspiration from Sound Of Music, and Mary Poppins, or is it Nanny McPhee, and a flavour of a popular teen novel series which has angels-doing-the-earthly-thing.
Saif and Rani look a great deal more comfortable with what they are asked to do, despite it being a fantasy: there is some cheese here as well (can’t be helped, with angels riding rainbows, with pretty little white flowers in their hair), but, praise be, only a little bit of preciousness, so teeny as to be negligible.
And that’s got to do with the fact that the kids are believable: the oldest, close to being a pre-teen, holds on longest to his resentment about being made to live with a man whom he hates ; the younger ones, including a cute ‘sardar’, lose their dislike a little faster.
Amisha, in a small role, is delightfully ditzy, her chief preoccupation being tarot card readers and Prada bags. Rani is mercifully reigned in, in her cheery Dilli-ki-Punjaban act (that’s her earthly guise, as nanny to the bereaved children). She says ‘sho shweet’ only once. Promise.
Rishi Kapoor, as the affable ‘bhagwaan ji’, does it nicely. But mostly it’s got to do with Saif, whose little crease-between-the-brows disappears with great felicity when he becomes pals with ‘his’ kids.
The angel learns the value of tears; the not-so-nice man gets to know the whole deal about ‘pyaar’, and becomes a good guy. And the ‘bachcha’ party gets the best of everything : for Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic, your essential accompaniment is a kid. Take yours, or borrow one.