Ishaan Sabarwal (John Abraham) is a good looking, smooth talking Casanova who is loathfully selfish and self-obsessed. He works as a producer in a music company and finds it difficult to come to terms with having a female (Raima Sen) as his boss. On his personal front, he lives with his girlfriend of three years, Anushka (Chitrangada Singh) in a swanky apartment owned by her. He has her place as his disposal for crashing in, trashing it with his personal parties etc. all for free, and doesn’t prefer even paying up for the feeble expense of milk!

The love-struck Anushka puts up with everything claiming it to be his childish behaviour that shall fade off the moment he would shoulder the responsibility of marriage. However, since his life revolves around him and his needs, he always shrugs off Anushka’s requests of introducing her to his family.

The most important ingredient that commonly goes amiss in Hindi romantic films is romance itself. While some appear shallow, some tend to become farcical or like in the case of Kapil Sharma’s I, Me Aur Main, soulless. For his debut offing, Kapil Sharma could well choose a slightly linear and simple plot. However, in a bid to do something “different”, he ends up making a cliched, inane and wishy-washy film that neither entertains you nor moves!

Although the film takes off on a breazy note, it doesn’t take too long for it to fall in a cliched trap and follow a predictable path right till the penultimate moment. What make it worse are the sub-plots that run parallely throughout the film and are highly shoddy and sketchy. The entire track of Ishaan’s boss and him discovering and promoting new talent is very weakly written and shoved only to stretch the runtime.

But even at that, one of the greatest parts of the film is its run time. With a mere 108 mins for its runtime you don’t even realise the first half passing by. The second half however, gets tedious with the melodramatic twists and turns. What comes as a little respite and also forms the highlight of the film is the unpredictable and innovative is its end that doesn’t mould the film into a conventional romantic category.

Kapil Sharma, despite having a wafer-thin plot manages to rope in three good looking actors for his film – John Abraham, Chitrangada Singh and Prachi Desai. Sadly, for him and us though, he falters completely in extracting performances out of all three of them. If you leave aside his good looks and jaw-dropping physique, John disappoints yet again with his performance. Prachi Desai too gives a completely over the top performance but you can only blame it on her character-sketch. The maker tries too hard to convert Zarina Wahab into Kirron Kher by giving an exacting role but falters badly at it. Raima Sen too gets royally wasted as the boss. Mini Mathur is average as Ishaan’s sister. Chitrandaga Singh remains the best of the lot with having her look as well as performance intact.

I, Me Aur Main in short is a sluggish, humdrum affair that only has a great end as its saving grace. I give the film 2 stars.

By Swati Rohatgi