Film

Maybe the best way to approach Chandni Chowk to China is to start with the title musical number, which begins as a militaristic set piece out of Hero and segues to a vaguely WWII-era street scene before turning into what appears to be a hip-hop-inflected Nike commercial. Generosity, thy name is Bollywood, and your enjoyment of Chandni Chowk depends on the degree to which you can roll with the movie’s cheesy f/x, mismatched cuts, broad acting, interchangeable genres, bloated run time and curious insistence on spelling out each new development five times, despite not making a lick of sense.

Warner Bros. is giving the film the widest American opening of any Bollywood production, though that doesn’t mean it travels well: Other films—like the blind-girl-regains-sight-only-to-find-that-her-boyfriend-is-an-’80s-Bond-film-terrorist epic Fanaa (2006)—are at once livelier in their pastiches and more tongue-in-cheek in their ineptitude. Showing as much fondness for Kill Bill as that movie’s progenitors, this kung fu homage finds a vegetable cook (superstar Kumar) mistaken for the reincarnation of a legendary Chinese warrior and taken to China to dispatch a diamond smuggler (Liu), who apparently gets his wardrobe tips from Oddjob. Among the highlights: possibly the longest training montage in film history, with our hero climbing stairways at the Great Wall instead of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To the extent that Chandni Chowk wins you over, it’s more with persistence than charm.