Set on an engineering campus in Delhi modeled after the IIT, the film features Aamir Khan

as free-spirited student Rancho who dishes out important life lessons to his roommates
Farhan and Raju (played by R Madhavan and Sharman Joshi), even as Naziesque campus
director Viru Sahastrabuddhe (played by Boman Irani) clashes with him for brazenly
rejecting conventional wisdom.

Rancho, as it turns out, can do just about anything. From empowering Farhan to convince his
family he wants to be a photographer not an engineer, to nursing another friend back to health
after a failed suicide attempt, Rancho even helps an unsuspecting girl open her eyes to the
superficial jerk she's about to marry, and believe it or not, at one point he even delivers a
baby on the college ping-pong table following instructions from a doctor on webcam.

But soon after teaching them these valuable lessons and touching their lives in some way or
the other, Rancho vanishes. The film is told mostly in flashback, with Farhan and Raju setting
off to find their buddy a few years later.

Going home after watching 3 Idiots I felt like I'd just been to my favorite restaurant only to
be a tad under-whelmed by their signature dish. It was a satisfying meal, don't get me wrong,
but not the best meal I'd been expecting.

#Masand's Verdict #3 Idiots

3 Idiots, starring Aamir Khan, produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and written and directed by
Rajkumar Hirani, is a film of impeccable pedigree. It's a breezy entertainer and it's got its
heart in the right place, but it appears to be lacking in the naiive idealism and old-fashioned
sincerity that propelled Hirani's two Munnabhai films to cult status.

Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's pulpy bestseller Five Point Someone, 3 Idiots takes light-
hearted but pointed jabs at the Indian education system, raising pertinent questions about the
relevance of learning by rote, the obsession with high grades, and the dangerous
repercussions of parental pressure to pursue traditional streams.

And because no Hindi film can be complete without a romance, Hirani and his co-writer
Abhijat Joshi also manage to squeeze in a love track between Rancho and the college
director's daughter Pia (played by Kareena Kapoor).

The film's first half breezes by effortlessly between Hirani's trademark comic flourishes
including a hilarious ragging scene, two witty confrontations with teachers, and even an
uproarious Farrelly Brothers-style gag involving a rolling pin and a paralysed man.
Expectedly, the humor is alternated with moments of poignancy like that delicate scene in
which the group first discovers a fellow student's suicide.

Problem is, the genuine lump-in-your-throat moments are few and far between, the
screenplay populated instead by a batch of scenes calling for push-button emotions. Where
the Munnabhai films cunningly tricked you into shedding an unexpected tear, 3 Idiots goes
for full-throttle melodrama.

The film's second half in particular, is a tiring mess of ridiculous back-stories, convenient
coincidences and sappy sentimentality.