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Review | Laal Singh Chaddha movie review: Aamir Khan stars in Bollywood remake of Forrest Gump
- The Forrest Gump story is transplanted to India in Laal Singh Chaddha, as a slow-witted Sikh man, Laal, recounts his life and India’s recent past to strangers
- While the film introduces a religious element not present in the original, it is at its best when celebrating India’s beauty and diversity
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3/5 stars
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Few films are more quintessentially American than Forrest Gump. Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Oscar winner gave Tom Hanks one of his most memorable roles: the eponymous southern simpleton who bumbles his way through pivotal episodes of 20th-century history, while effusing nuggets of homespun wisdom to the strains of Elvis Presley and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Transplanting the story to another culture might be seen as missing the film’s point entirely, and yet this is precisely what Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan attempts in his latest offering, Laal Singh Chaddha.
Reimagining the story almost beat for beat from the perspective of a slow-witted Sikh man named Laal (Khan), India’s recent past is recounted in similarly wide-eyed fashion, not from a park bench, but in a bustling railway carriage.
As with his predecessor, Laal struggles his way through school and is forced to wear leg braces, until he discovers a passion for running that ushers him through university, and eventually to the front lines of war, in this case the Kargil Conflict in Kashmir (May to July 1999) rather than Vietnam.
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