IMDb #114 Review: 3 Idiots (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

There must be serious problems with India's school system. Not only because of this movie's subject matter, but because of the little things it gets wrong.

First off, there are four main idiots, not three. And they're not really idiots, though they act like it. They're actually enrolled at a prestigious engineering college. Where the straitlaced superintendent remains convinced of their idiocy.

The possible exception among their gang is a cheerful laid-back genius. He flouts the rigid structure and advocates learning through fun (and song). His foil sneers at his laxity and crams his way to the top, bragging and flattering and forgetting everything he memorizes. The other two guys follow the first guy, because he's infinitely cooler. (Easy when you're rich and attractive and not just smart.)

No, it's not a school piece. Not entirely. The guys reunite ten years after graduation to find out who's most successful. Problem: the cool guy, name of Rancho, is missing. So his cronies (along with the weaselly brownnoser and his lethal flatulence) embark on a road trip to find him. It quickly skews into bizarre directions. While they flash back to the college misadventures that made them love him this much in the first place.

The main villain is the pressure to succeed. Fathers decide their sons will become engineers, never asking what their sons want to be. Wildlife photographer? Inventor? B-student? Dropout? Disowned. Brutally exemplified with a rash of student suicides.

There's an undercurrent of mischief -- the guys botch job interviews, sabotage stuffy speeches, crash weddings, threaten to drop a dead dad's ashes into a toilet, even foil a dignified suicide.

What could become unbearably gloomy or vacuously fluffy opts for the middle road: cheesy. There's singing (most notably "All Is Well," which works like a boppy poppy Engrish-saturated "Hakuna Matata"). Cartoonish sound effects accompany the contrived hijinks. And, another Bollywood staple, add the godawful CGI.

But I promise the weirdness leads to a point. The boozing, the romance, the rebellion -- it culminates in a climax as stirring as it is absurd. A bunch of male engineering students must midwife a baby during a power outage using only the miscellaneous tools at hand. How? I'm still not quite sure.

I've seen Bollywood formula work this way before. It softens the heart with warm sentimentality, then burrows in with rock-candy teeth and lays eggs.

171 minutes.