Chance Pe Dance

Chance Pe Dance has been panned by everybody – and for a good reason. A overly-simplistic screenplay, punctuated with songs with absolutely NO link with the story, it’s a doomed effort - despite the best efforts of Shahid and Genelia. You know something is not right when the opening is a full length song, and THEN the conventional opening credits come. No explanation given about the song and neither does it have any connection with the subsequent scenes. Possibly at the editing table, the makers realised that they had one extra song that didn’t fit in the movie, and they didn’t want to waste the song …

Not to mention, a dance movie atleast can have some hummable tunes – sadly, not even one. Its like these guys never watched Jhoom Barabar Jhoom!

Apart from horrible placement of songs and indifferent songs themselves, the movie suffers from a clear lack of thinking in the script. While watching Chance Pe Dance, I kept going back to Kaminey, Shahid Kapoor’s last outing – how meticulously thought out each dialogue, each scene was. Compared to it, Chance Pe Dance feels like a really amateur attempt – hard to believe it’s a seasoned director’s movie. (Before you jump on me, there is no similarity between Chance Pe Dance & Kaminey – only the same lead actor)

However, any dance afficianado (or Shahid Kapoor fan) would probably find a lot to like in the movie. Shahid looks good, emotes very well and dances fabulously. His dancing was known to be good, but in this movie he is in Hrithik Roshan territory. Genelia plays the bubbly-girl role that we all know by now – but my ears are still hearing a strong southie accent in her hindi. Overall, her’s and Shahid’s chemistry is pretty good.

The plot – Sameer (Shahid) is a son of a sari-shop owner (Parikshit Sahni) in Delhi who has been struggling in Bombay for 3 years now. He happens to catch the eye of a prominent director at a pub, and lands the lead role, only for it to slip it away from his fingers. He is also thrown out of his apartment for non-payment of dues. But he meets and befriends a choregrapher Sonia (Genelia) – who convinces him to take part in a talent hunt competition. Meanwhile, Sameer becomes a dance teacher at a school to bunch of no-hopers – I guess you can work out the rest.

If the script had been worked on a little more, it would probably have made a successful underdog movie. To director Ken Ghosh’s credit, he has tried to show how a struggler’s life can be – the opening scenes of the movie are good that way. But then goes and spoils it by giving Shahid’s character a car – how many strugglers can afford a car ? And for such a fabulous dancer, the finale song was such a damp squib – with six-packs, yes, but the dance was just ordinary.

And that is unfortunately, how its best to describe Chance Pe Dance – ordinary.