Goal! (Dhun Dhuna Dhun)

Dear fucking lord. I don't know what possessed me to agree to go for the bloody film, in fact I was forced into it. The tickets were bought and I was informed I was going to be watching. The fact that the sister's boyfriend who on every visit to my house prompts intense flashes of rage, requiring much self control to not injure him, was at my house for dinner did contribute to my desire to not be home. My first movie in a considerably long time, and to sum up my feelings for the complete bullcrap I sat through for over three hours, I came up with a bit of a jingle.

It's the scripting it's the acting and the camerawork is bloody poo
The editing leaves you wondering what the fuck just happened dude
The story's so clee-shay, and the footballers, oh they can't play
and oh my god John Abraham just hug your dad it's not that gay.

Granted my skill with jingles isn't extraordinary, but you get the gist. Let's break it down to some of the key elements. Doctor Bipasha Basu's primary job is to stand around in every shot holding something arbitrary, alternating with extreme close ups of her face looking distressed, or in some cases, constipated. The one time she gets to play doctor, she spends flirting with our man John, and ends his nose reconstruction with hand cream and a piece of surgical tape. Granted that's gotta be one of the best acting jobs anyone's ever had, to just stand around and do nothing, and get paid a whole bunch.
Arshad Warsi, an excellent comedian's mostly dead serious in this movie, and treats his wife like a puppy when he finds her perched on the edge of their tub crying. It turns our that she's pregnant, and has the uncanny ability of making the kid in there alternate between being eight months into development, and four months, all in a span of a week of learning that she's actually pregnant.
There's this brilliant South Indian or Bangladeshi, I can't tell which, fellow, with an amazing 'one-pack', who manages to constantly and continuously break down in tears. Especially when he got the very necessary Bollywood slap, when the only Sardar I've ever seen unable to hold his drink consoles him. This Sardar who spends the majority of the movie flirting with women suddenly acquires a wife when John ditches the team, who spills all manner of state secrets involving sacrifice, which leave the team and John largely unaffected, for that scene at least. Though Arshad bhai manages to remember the sacrifice later in the changing room, before a crucial match that the team inevitably loses..
There was also the fact that they couldn't have any fight scenes in a sporty movie such as this, so at one point, when Arshad Warsi's running after Boman Irani to get him to coach the team, they play fight music anyway, to a very odd long wide shot, largely empty, with Boman Sahib standing in the middle in a position I see most men against walls peeing in. That isn't to say Boman Irani did a bad job. He's a brilliant actor, and the scenes with him were only slightly bearable.
Not to mention the big John-Bips kiss. She gives him a cute and rather endearing peck to his lips and runs, at which point he grabs her, brings her into a stranglehold, and proceeds to indulge in what I can only describe as a devouring of her face. She keeps her eyes tightly shut and her lips puckered, and he goes to town on her lips, which is to say he sucks on them like a freaking popsicle. It was the only time I've ever seen two people kiss and be unsure of whether to turn my head and retch, or else to step in and teach them how to do it right.
Then there were the team itself. The entire team somehow, a depressing bunch at large, went from a joint hatred of the Johnman to intense love and bonding. There was also the scene where John Abraham and Arshad Warsi were on the verge of spooning, when the effects of their alcohol had managed to wear off, even though I couldn't see an IV on either of them. While the scene and dialog was one of the few (read almost only) that inspired any sense of emotional depth to the characters, it was promptly forgotten the next day, when John got picked up by a superior club, with a Porsche dangled in front of him that he only knows how to drive in a straight line, constantly increasing the volume of the radio.
Finally, the technical. This movie was bad enough for the casual movie-goer, hell I've never seen an entire cinema hall in splits from non-tapori jokes. For a media student who's shot and edited a few short films and sequences, this movie was torture. The cameraman had some strange notions, and the editor(s) had me wanting to offer to re-edit the entire film, free of charge.
All shots of someone sitting in a car had the camera locked at some weird angle where the entire front pillar and a large chunk of the windshield were also visible, leading to an under/over/under/over-water effect, there were some strange empty shots with a football in the foreground and two exhausted characters tucked away in a corner far back with a lot of rainy empty space, shaky shots, which I suppose were intended to follow the actor's steps but only yielded a sense of vertigo, and a lot of shots that were completely off focus.
Message to the director: I can even understand trying out new spot boys and focus boys for your movie, thanks for giving the next generation of camera assistants jobs man, I appreciate it already, just please make sure you reshoot the scenes where the lighting's skewered, and where they didn't quite grasp the concept of aperture when it comes to depth of field.
The editor(s) decided the film needed endless quick cuts, and when the training montage came up, they decided to put a few random man-boobs lifting (and pulling) weights in the wrong way. They also seemed to feel that the audio tracks didn't need to match the video, as when Bipasha screamed out Sun-ny, rather than run out and check on him herself, being the team doctor, I could've sworn her lips were saying Dooood-man.

I would be really pissed right now if I had paid for the ticket, and I hadn't been consoled during the interval with three hot dogs and a giant tub of popcorn with extra butter. I'm also getting a butter chicken meal at my beloved Krips tomorrow to make up for this god damn abysmal movie.