When I happened upon "Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic" at my local library, knowing nothing else about this film beforehand, the DVD presentation caught my eye as a good bet for an undemanding evening's entertainment: a simple light-hearted nanny story along lines of "Mary Poppins" or "The Sound of Music", presented by a solid star cast (Rani Mukherjee, Saif Ali Khan, Amisha Patel) whose work elsewhere I have much enjoyed.
How could such a project -- with so many good things going for it -- go so terribly wrong?
"Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic", however, disappoints in every way.
The script/dialogues were so stale and hackneyed the writer should be shot at dawn.
The director (Kunal Kohli) was asleep at the switch. Or so obsessed with packaging a 'commercial' project from tired formulae that he disregarded any concern with sense or quality.
['Commercialism' didn't work. The film lost money bigtime, anyway.]
Casting? The four children (who looked completely unalike) cast in the key roles as the four orphans at the heart of the story have to be THE least engaging, THE least talented, even THE least 'likeable' child actors I've seen in any movie for many years ... such completely unappealing, even outright repulsive children, that while watching this movie I found myself actually thinking the dead parents had had a lucky escape!
Rishi Kapoor's cameo appearance as God -- and a strangely ineffectual god at that, whether large or small "G" -- was a complete throwaway, underwritten and charmless.
What bothered me about this film most of all, I think, was the fundamental 'meanness of spirit' that pervaded the whole movie ... a meanness, even open maliciousness, that felt especially out of place given the genre and context.
Even music by the normally gifted Shankar Ehsaan Loy couldn't save this turkey.
"2" rather than "1" (IMDb's lowest possible rating) purely to credit actors Saif Ali Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Amisha Patel, and Sharat Saxena for their brave efforts, through individual performance, to try bringing anything useful whatsoever out of their poorly conceived and badly written characters in this hopelessly failed story.
