Director: Siddharth Malhotra

Rating:**

How hard can it be to re-fill outlines that have been firmly drawn and delivered? We Are Family , Dharma Productions’ official remake of Hollywood hit Stepmom , makes it look as if it can’t be done.

Maya (Kajol) is raising three children on her own, because husband Aman (Rampal) is now an ex. He’s the kind of ex any divorced woman would be happy to have, though: instead of getting lost in new flame Shreya’s (Kareena) arms, as he properly should, he’s always going on about his beloved bachchas .

Of course, Maya is the perfect stay-at-home mom, and of course Shreya is the complete career woman, so there is Conflict. Not just their mother, who has the decency to look cheesed off at the new woman in her husband’s life, the children hate her, too.  

"I don’t want to be your mom, but we can be friends, no?” says Shreya, whisking away her frillies strewn in the father’s bedroom. The children proceed to behave badly. If I were Shreya, I’d threaten to thwack them, too. Sadly, she seems to have no child-rearing skills at all. Can’t be that hard to keep them fed and watered as they seem to subsist on bread and pizza (the spaghetti is used solely to be flung at each other), but she flubs that too, as Maya grows increasingly wan and pale, and poor Aman shuttles between both.

This is a film geared to flood our emotional valves : how can anyone remain unmoved at the impending, untimely death of a mother, who lives only for her children? Maya’s discovery that she has very little time left should have shaken us to our core: Kajol gets in there somewhat, but not all the way. No one, not the immaculately put together Kareena, nor the slimly sketched Arjun Rampal, gets to do that.

... contd.