India can give us cheap labor, and India can give us great food, but India can't give me back the three hours of my life spent watching SWADES. The latest film from Ashutosh Gowarikar, the guy who directed LAGAAN, it stars Shah Rukh Khan and has music by A.R. Rahman. Ashutosh is the fellow who managed to make an hour long cricket game an edge-of-your-seat experience, so one would think that he's capable of doing anything short of flying to the moon, and he might even be able to do that, too. A.R. Rahman is a genius, and Shah Rukh Khan is the most overexposed man in Bollywood, but I still love him. But for all these plusses, SWADES winds up being just a big fat minus.

Just so we're all on the same page: Shah Rukh plays an NRI who's a NASA engineer, living in Washington, DC (where, apparently, they do shuttle launches, which I thought was a little weird, but okay). He misses his dead parents (don't we all), and is consumed by guilt that he hasn't stayed in touch with the nanny who raised him (aren't we all), so he takes off for India, rents a Winnebago, and tracks down the nanny to a little village. There he, natch, falls in love with the palest, skinniest woman in town, um, I mean a beautiful, spunky schoolteacher (Gayatri Joshi, making her debut) and he has to decide: is he a real Indian who'll stay in his village and make things better, or a dirty rotten NRI who's going to live in America and shun his country.

SWADES falls into the growing genre of lousy follow-up films. In the late 90's and early 2000's there were a bunch of films that came out that really stretched the boundaries of Bollywood: HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, DIL CHATA HAI by Farhan Akhtar, and LAGAAN by Ashutosh Gowarikar. All three directors have taken a long time to make their next movies, and their next movies have been huge steps backwards. I love DEVDAS, Sanjay Leela Bhansali's follow-up to HDDCS, but it's a less original movie. HDDCS played with the cliches of the Bollywood love story while DEVDAS is simply an incredibly well-made remake of, well, DEVDAS. It doesn't provide much in the way of new insight, or a radical new take on the source material except to add more sequins. Farhan Akhtar went back into the past, following up DIL CHATA HAI with LAKSHYA, a by-the-numbers Indo-Pak action flick that even co-starred the Big B himself. Now, Ashutosh has followed up LAGAAN with SWADES which is just another social issue movie, the kind of thing Manoj Kumar made back in the 70's, telling Indians that there's no place like India, and to stay true to their country.

The story of SWADES never seems to get started, and the chemistry between the leads was odd, until I realized that there were actually two sets of identical twins playing Shah Rukh and Gayatri's parts: one set are skilled actors with chemistry, the other set are duds who rely on stock mannerisms and who have all the chemistry of a housecat and a potato. The music is good, but there's only three songs in the whole movie (maybe four) and the visualizations of them are just lousy beyond belief -- you almost feel embarrassed for the actors having to plod through their steps.

I've seen SWADES praised on Bollywood sites, but it can only be appreciated by someone with no sense of Indian film history. I'm no authority, but even I know that these "Save India/Work Together" movies have been made before, and better, and they've been remade before, and better (YUVA, Mani Ratnam's 2004 film). Coming on the heels of VEER-ZAARA the end of 2004 has been a lousy one-two punch of blah from Bollywood.