Warner Brothers' first Bollywood import crosses the excesses of Hindi popular film with Chinese slapstick and American infantilism. The setup (a silly character takes a crash course in martial arts to defeat a villain who menaces a village) is similar to "Kung Fu Panda," the manic pixilation of action scenes owes much to Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu Hustle," and the overall style follows the mix-and-match potpourri of Hindi entertainment, delivering a pie in the face with a tear in its eye.
The title, "Chandni Chowk to China," is not as awkward as it seems, as the story follows vegetable chopper Sidhu (Akshay Kumar) from the Chandni Chowk neighborhood of Delhi, India, to a village in China, where -- falsely regarded as the reincarnation of warrior Liu Sheng -- he is expected to kill the feared Hojo (Gordon Liu). Along the way, he gets mixed up with twin sisters Sakhi and Meow Meow (Deepika Padukone), who are identical except that one is Indian and the other Chinese.
Children and undiscriminating adults may enjoy the flurry of eye-catching activities that storm incessantly across the screen for its 2 1/2 hours, but the reigning stupidity of the enterprise is liable to tire anyone else in attendance. Most Bollywood productions sustain their epic lengths with episodic sojourns into stock sequences lifted from a panoply of genres regardless of what kind of story is being told. Director Nikhil Advani, however, streamlines the contrasting materials into a single plotline, the result being an overlong kung fu movie rather than a relatively short Hindi entertainment.
As Sidhu, Kumar sports a ridiculous moustache that gives him a Borat quality. He loses the facial hair when his character enters his heroic phase, but even then he suffers from that drowned puppy look that Adam Sandler so often affects. More charismatic is the villain Hojo, a steel-eyed parody of Goldfinger's Oddjob, played to perfection by martial-arts veteran Liu. For those who favor beauty over brawn, Maybelline cover girl and former badminton star Padukone is a knockout in her dual role as the estranged sisters.
