No Entry

Anil Kapoor plays a married man whose wife (Lara Dutta) suspects his every move. Fardeen Khan is a good friend who works with Anil and stays in his guest house. Anil is tempted when their married-but-straying friend Salman Khan tempts him to have a fling with Bipasha Basu, a dancer. Though Anil comes to his senses before any damage is done, he is forced to introduce Bipasha as Fardeen’s friend to Lara. That begins a train of lies, cover-ups and mistaken identities.

If the story sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because No Entry is a rip-off of our own Charlie Chaplin with Prabhu, Prabhu Deva, Abhirami, Gayatri Raghuram and Monal. The Hindi version simply mounts the same story with a better-looking(though not necessarily better-performing) cast and nicer production values.

No Entry borrows the funniest and most effective sequences (Fardeen’s wedding, the entire Mauritius sequence) without much change from the Tamil original while adding a few minor ones of its own. I even recognized some of the lines as being exactly the same. So the laughs come fairly regularly. I vaguely remember Charlie Chaplin taking a turn for the serious towards the end but No Entry maintains its humorous tone right up to the climax. I liked this better.

Anil is very good and has some nice comical expressions. Lara Dutta is impressive too. But both Fardeen and Celina Jaitley are rather stiff and go over-the-top in the few scenes they are supposed to act. Salman’s role almost seems like an extended cameo (the role was played by Livingston in the Tamil version!) and he is packed off to South Africa for a while in the second half. He has little range and acts exactly as he did in other comedies like Mujse Shaadi Karogi or Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya?. Boman Irani is wasted.