I have always felt that of all the stuff ( I hear some thing, wait, drivel, you say! Shame on you, he is the best selling author of thousands of un-pirated copies!) that Chetan Bhagat has written, 2 States was the best. Maybe because the story was still the strongest emotional connect he had - his marriage to someone from South India. The IIT story, for him, was in the past, but his marriage was on-going. At least, that is my theory.
But, 2 States the movie, has managed to take even that little emotional connect the book had with its readers down to a barely-felt, ok-to-watch-once-when-one-is-totally -bored genre. But, thank fully, the director had the sense to add a strong father-son story line where the love-story-falls short; both Arjun Kapoor and Ronit Roy perform wonderfully in these scenes. The actor playing the Tamil father also does well in the few scens he has.
Alia Bhatt as a student at IIM, that too at Ahmedabad, is too hard to swallow. (I mean, people who manage to mix-up Prime Minister of India and Chief Minister of Maharashtra (on Karan Johar' show), will not even be allowed in the campus, methinks). But, to her credit, she passes in the role, because, she has tried hard to do a good job, even though they gave her a job at Sunsilk. I mean come on, too much for the sake of product placement.
Revati was wasted in her role, given her calibre, and Amritha Singh, though she shines in a few scenes, comes across as an over-acting-cringe-inducing performer. But, then that could be the director making her do that.
The movie's saving grace is that even though it lacks several appendages, is that the story, still, has heart.
