A DEOL TOO MANY
Sample these lyrics from two item songs in Samir Karnik's Yamla Pagla Deewana and you should get a general drift of the film's aesthetic quotient -- "Pal pal na maane tinku jiya / Ishq ka manjan ghise hai piya" in which Dharmendra grabs and kisses the skimpily clad dancer every now and then. The other song has words such as, "Pehle thi main shakkar jaisi / Namak ki bori ban gayi". The film's first half is shot at the same Benaras ghats where Satyajit Ray filmed his masterpiece Aparajito. That's about all the two films have in common.
What Karnik and co. are trying to do is cash in on Dharmendra's erstwhile charm and Sunny Deol's dhai kilo ka haath -- which he gets to use a lot (there's even a Matrix moment with several earthen pots poised mid-air waiting for him to smash them!). But Dharmendra has aged and not too well -- his dialogues are barely coherent through his dentures and his facial muscles look strangely stretched. Sunny is past his prime (and yet the most endearing act in the film) and Bobby never made it in the first place. Much of the humour and the senseless abandon that the film tries to conjure up then, falls flat.
YPD starts off as a tribute to the lost-and-found formula of the '60s and '70s and the plot involves an honest Sikh from Canada (which most characters in the film refer to as Caneda) Paramveer Singh (Sunny Deol) who comes to India to find his estranged con man father Dharam (Dharmendra) and brother Gajodhar (Bobby Deol, who unfortunately gets maximum screen time).
The second half involves the trio's efforts to win over Gajodhar's love interest Saheba (Kulraj Randhawa) from her fiery brothers led by Anupam Kher and it's significantly worse than the first. The only saving grace is the OTT Sucheta Khanna as Saheba's cousin Poli whose ultimate dream is to marry an NRI from Caneda. Sketched as a broad caricature, she still manages to evoke a few genuine laughs in an otherwise grating hodgepodge.
And oh, where did they dig Mukul Dev out from?
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