Producer & Director : Feroz Khan
*ing: Introducing Fardeen Khan and Meghna Kothari, Raj Babbar, Anupam Kher, Beena, and Smita Jaykar
Music: Anu Malik

Released on : October 30, 1998

WARNING:  This film contains many dialogues and scenes of an explicit sexual nature, as well as an immature handling of adult themes.   Planet Bollywood strongly recommends that it not be seen by children under the age of 18.

Reviewed by: Mohammad Ali Ikram
ali@indolink.com

out of 
Yuck! Yuck! And triple yuck!  Prem Aggan is officially one of the worst films I have seen in my life.  Feroz Khan is running from magazine to magazine claiming he is targeting an intelligent audience with this monstrosity, but I doubt any intelligent person would enjoy it.  Khan has always had an eye for the vulgar and insipid, but this film takes the cake.  The experience of enduring it is quite seriously 'pain and agony'.

Wohi ghissi piti kahani.  A rich, mentally-deranged girl (Meghna Kothari), who cannot act to save her life, falls in love with a literally poor, loser of a boy (Fardeen Khan).  The girl's father, a rich corporate tycoon (Anupam Kher), objects to the union along with the girl's brother.  Lover boy's father (Raj Babbar) is an upright Armed Forces official who helps his son achieve his goals. The rich tycoon catches the couple red-handed as they sleep together in the hero's little shack (the heroine has tested the hero's 'decency' a few seconds earlier).   The hero gets beat up and the heroine is forced to go to Australia to marry the man of daddy dearest's dreams;  a drinking womanizer.  Post-interval the heroine becomes a drunkard and the hero sings the same song for days on end until his papa lets him sell his motorcycle and go to win back his beloved.  In spite of the torture inflicted on the audience, unfortunately neither the hero nor the heroine die at the end of the movie.

From where did Feroz Khan concoct the unbelievably stupid scenes and dialogues in this movie.  One cannot help but shake their head in disbelief.  For instance, it has been the heroine's dream, since the age of ten, to jump off a cliff with her true love!?!?!?  On her first 'date' with the guy, she coaxes and coos, and they eventually take the dive.  Excuse me?  What kind of an idiotic message does that send out to the minds of young impressionable youths?  Logic and common sense would dictate that the hero drop her off at an insane asylum, instead of jumping off the cliff with her. 

The dialogues, as already mentioned, are no better.  You have every single cast member delivering what appears to be an endless barrage of (dumb) poetry, in an attempted Hindi Shakespearean style, replete with (annoying) accentuated pauses in their speech patterns every few seconds.  Raj Babbar and Anupam Kher's verbal diarrhea match outside the jail cell scene, had half the audience, including myself, down for a ten-count on the mat. 

The performances are no better.  Meghna Kothari has the face of a baby, and acting talent to match.  I do not know when, if ever, the short and tight silk underwear cum shorts fashion started in colleges, but there appears to be nothing else in Meghna's clothing closet.  One wishes the heroine's friend (and prospective, screen sister-in-law) was given Meghna's role instead.  Not only does she have more talent than Meghna, but she is also more friendly to the viewers' eyes. 

Feroz tries to redeem Fardeen Khan's uninspired presence by compelling each female character to announce his 'attractiveness' each time he appears on screen.  Too bad for Feroz that no one in the audience is as enamoured.  Fardeen might make a semi-decent actor if he has a competent director to work with, but for now, Fardeen's talent compares unfavourably to even Sanjay Kapoor.   The entire supporting cast is there to mouth the psychotic dialogues and run away with the their salaries.

Technically the film is in a marginally different universe.  It is the only aspect of the movie somewhat commendable.  The cinematography and colours makes Australia look wonderful (though probably not as good as in Hindustani and Daud), but the choreography is nothing to write home about. 

It is quite amazing that Feroz Khan could ever make interesting movies like Qurbani, Dayavan (yes, a remake of Mani Ratnam's Nayakan) and Yalgaar in the past.  Each one was admittedly vulgar and immature in parts, but there was also some semblance of sanity and entertainment in each.  Sanity takes so far a backseat in Prem Aggan, that it falls out the trunk.  What we are left with is a show-piece of vulgarity in an asinine universe.