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With Iqbal and Dor it indeed looked like Nagesh Kukunoor was finally in form with medium-budget, script-based, performance-oriented cinema. Bombay to Bangkok is, however, not a first-rate start to a year that promises to be Kukunoor’s annus mirabilis (two of his other films are lined up for release in 2008).

Bombay to Bangkok is Kukunoor’s second collaboration with producer Subhash Ghai (after the simple but emotionally tugging tale of Iqbal). One can’t help getting a vague feeling that Ghai was generous with his inputs here: was it the one-line idea of a Mumbai lad falling in love with a Thai masseuse, or, that tagline, ‘same same but different’?

Kukunoor fails to show strength in working out (enough) plots to build up this romantic comedy and keeping the film apace. The basic storyline – a Mumbai chef (Shreyas Talpade) who runs away to Bangkok with money that belongs to a gangster, and falls in love with a Thai girl (Lina Christensen) while being followed by the gangster’s rapper son – is the kind that can go in any direction, depending on the quality of the execution of the idea. In B2B, the story starts well, but soon loses its way and just fails to ‘arrive’. For a comedy of errors, the plots are too thin and plainly laid-out. They are stretched way beyond their asking time – about five half-baked episodes take more than two hours to play out. The result: a film that goes too slow with not much happening most of the time.

Nagesh Kukunoor might have tried out Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s grammar for rom-coms: toned down humor and (Amol Palekar’s) dead pan speeches (here, by Shreyas Talpade to much less rousing response). It would do well to recall that Mukherjee’s films however simple they looked, had well laid-out plots, and their situational comedy was greatly enhanced by effortless humor that were contemporary and urbane (for the times). And Mukherjee’s films biggest strength was that the two elements, romance and comedy, were inseparable.

In Bombay to Bangkok, romance and comedy are like oil and water, they just refuse to mix well. The film’s humor is restricted to the plots where the hero searches for his money-bag. The long romantic stretches where the two lead-pair ride, sing, dance, smooch in clichéd Bollywood styles have no humor in it.

B2B’s sporadic sparks of humor are especially in the comic characters of JAMK (Vijay Maurya), the rapper son of the Mumbai gangster (Naseeruddin Shah, possibly in one of the briefest guest appearances in history), the psychiatrist Dr. Rati and her interest in the perverse human mind, and the hero’s mother, with her geography all mixed up. But the fun moments are too few and far between and short-lived. The clash and confusion of languages – Thai and Hindi – that the film depends on heavily to create humor fails entirely (the effort to laugh at the strangeness of Thai accent is tasteless). But it’s not the dearth of comic elements that finally undermines the film; it is its romantic side, which, urm, is not very romantic.

Shreyas is okay with his comic act but looks funny and uncomfortable in the romantic scenes. Lina Christensen (oddly Nordic name) looks like a Thai babe lost in (Bolly)wood. The only performance that evinces some genuine laughter is Vijay Maurya’s. He is spot on from the first scene with that slightly pained expression on his face – is it the anguish of getting the rhymes right? (It works.) The less said about the music and lyrics the better.

While being prolific is an admirable quality in a filmmaker, consistency would not be undesirable either. Kukunoor will have ten films in roughly 11 years of his starting out – with adorable works in Hyderabad Blues, Iqbal, and Dor but there will also be rock-bottom films in Rockford, Teen Deewarein, and now this economy ride to Bangkok.

A final thought: When and why does a director make a particular film? When he/ she has a good story to tell and manages to secure the money for the shoot? Or, when he/ she gets money to make a film and quickly arranges for a story?

- Padmaja Thakore