The title may conjur up images of the 3 Stooges and the crude humour of the opening might suggest a Hindi "Porky's" but with a running time of almost three hours "3 Idiots" clearly has its mind on higher things. It's a Bollywood buddy-movie devised as an epic and determined to outdo all the competition and being a Bollywood movie is full of large-scale musical numbers as well as a lot of very broad and very funny comedy.
The 3 idiots of the title meet as engineering students, become life-long friends but are separated by that old fickle finger of fate. It's also bold enough to deal with such issues as suicide and poverty and, of course, the caste system and is lifted onto an altogether higher plain by a terrific performance from Aamir Khan as 'the idiot' the other two worship and who, naturally, isn't an idiot at all but the sharpest tool in the box and he's brilliantly supported by Sharman Joshi as his potentially suicidal friend and Omi Vaidya as his number one rival. Brilliantly directed by Rajkumar Hirani this is the kind of film Hollywood could learn a lot from and which, had it been a Hollywood film, might well have swept the boards come Oscar time.
The 3 idiots of the title meet as engineering students, become life-long friends but are separated by that old fickle finger of fate. It's also bold enough to deal with such issues as suicide and poverty and, of course, the caste system and is lifted onto an altogether higher plain by a terrific performance from Aamir Khan as 'the idiot' the other two worship and who, naturally, isn't an idiot at all but the sharpest tool in the box and he's brilliantly supported by Sharman Joshi as his potentially suicidal friend and Omi Vaidya as his number one rival. Brilliantly directed by Rajkumar Hirani this is the kind of film Hollywood could learn a lot from and which, had it been a Hollywood film, might well have swept the boards come Oscar time.