18 Years Of Dhadkan: Why this film worked?

Akshay Kumar, Shilpa Shetty and Suniel Shetty’s Dhadkan completes 18 years today. The story of the film could be described as Old Wine in a New Bottle. A poor man and a rich woman are passionately in love, so much so that they go overboard with their expressions while singing love duets on isolated locations. Destiny and cinematic twist deal a cruel hand and woman gets married to our hero. The hero is bhola bhaala, seedha-saadha, but belongs to a family of cunning, conniving and cliched people.

Despite knowing the truth, he refuses for any confrontations because he believes love conquers all. Heroine is mighty impressed and falls in love with him. And destiny and cinematic twist strike again and the scorned ex-lover returns with retribution and winning his love back, but wait, he now owns 500 crores.

The biggest reason why Dhadkan worked despite brimming with clichés is Nadeem-Shravan’s music. Just like Darshan’s earlier blockbuster, Raja Hindustani, where their tunes and that long, passionate kiss between a taxi driver (Aamir Khan) and a city belie (Karisma Kapoor) did wonders at the ticket windows, Dhadkan clicked because of its musical score and a lot of help from Akshay and Shilpa’s off-screen romance that was the talk of the town back in 2000.

Another reason was Suniel Shetty, playing Dev, and hamming just like he would. Over-acting was never this much fun, and the actor brought menace with his villainous turn as the evil lover who would stoop to anything to win his Anjali back.

Lastly, Darshan made this film after the monstrosity called Mela, which stills remains Aamir Khan’s worst film yet. In comparison to that wretched film, Dhadkan felt like a cult classic. And for some people, still is!

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