Lost in translation?

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2018)

As an englishman I seem to have stumbled across '3 Idiots' the same way as many others working their way through the top 250, and out of the three Indian movies I have seen it is by far the worst. Female wrestling exercise 'Danghal' was passable, and the emotionally manipulative dyslexia film 'Like Stars On Earth' was barely passable, but alas I still had hope that '3 Idiots' would surpass them both. I was sorely mistaken.
The titular 3 idiots are played by men clearly in their 30s and 40s despite supposedly being college age, with the main character being an embarrassing Aamir Khan. Like the previous two Indian movies I have seen, the 2 hour 50 minute runtime is an undeserved slog to get through, this length inflated by having a fourth-wall smashing music video every other scene. It doesn't particularly matter whether a song is appropriate for the mood of a scene, as shown by the song 'All is well', an awful pop song that ends with a tasteless reveal of a student having hung himself to death in his room.
The plot of the film is difficult to follow, but luckily isn't particularly worth following either, with characters such as the antagonist being one-dimesional charicatures of 'authourity'. And that's not mentioning the female love interest, who turns up halfway through the film out of necessity just so the audience can be bored once again with shmaltzy 'romantic' ballads. The social commentary is unoriginal and obvious, with the main moral seemingly being to 'follow your dreams', although the characters and their actions are so unrealistic that this message barely gets through.
'3 Idiots' also fails to earn it's tag as a comedy, and I didn't laugh once throughout the entire runtime - other than out of pure amazement at how awful some scenes were. This film's idea of humour is somebody getting electrocuted by urinating on an electric wire, something that made me unintentionally uncomfortable, all acted with melodramatic facial experssions that reminded me of children's entertainment.
All things considered this is a really awful film, and my 2/10 rating isn't to bring the ludicrous overall score down, but is an accurate representation of my hatred for this film.