Arranged Marriage

Directed by Anoop Rangi, Arranged Marriage details the strife that ensues between a young woman (Megha Sandhu’s Kamali Matthu) and her traditional family after she refuses to go through with the title occurrence – with the character’s problems exacerbated by a series of brutal murders. Filmmaker Rangi, working from his own screenplay, delivers a periodically stylish yet mostly interminable misfire that remains woefully unable to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, as the movie, which runs a palpably padded-out 90 minutes, suffers from a wildly inconsistent midsection that’s riddled with incoherent, incompetent attributes – with, for example, the picture’s various attempts at humor falling completely and frustratingly flat (eg a police officer wraps caution tape around a mannequin’s waist). It’s clear, as well, that Rangi’s continuing efforts at satirizing certain less-than-progressive elements within Kamali’s culture are undermined (and canceled out) by his subtle-as-a-brick approach, as the film’s protagonists generally come off as one-dimensional, hopelessly cartoonish caricatures that rarely, if ever, behave like normal human people. (And this is to say nothing of the racist cop with the Hitler mustache that eventually shows up.) By the time the especially underwhelming final stretch rolls around, which features a sudden turnabout for Sandhu’s character that makes not a lick of sense, Arranged Marriage has cemented its place as a pervasively inept and uninvolving endeavor that squanders the potential inherent in its workable (and thoroughly relevant) premise.

* out of ****