Movie review: ‘Dangerous Ishhq’s’ ham-fisted dance with reincarnation

Packing a lot of action — if not a lot of sense — into its story, the Indian film “Dangerous Ishhq” likely won’t win over any new believers to the idea of reincarnation as it weaves between a quilt of romantic thriller and historical drama.

The film opens with a Mumbai supermodel (Karisma Kapoor, a star making her return to the screen after an absence of a number of years) preparing to leave for Paris to be an international face for a luxury fashion brand. As she is wavering about whether to leave behind her wealthy industrialist boyfriend, his beachfront home is attacked by a gang of kidnappers. In the ensuing scuffle, she suffers a blow to the head that causes her to start having visions from her past lives.

Looping back though eras, she comes to discover that the answers to her present-day kidnapping conundrum lie within her many pasts, as ancient rituals and rivalries continue to play themselves out in the present day.

It’s all wildly over-complicated and at times even a bit difficult to track which era she has stumbled back into.

The idea of the past’s effect on the present is handled in such a direct “ah-ha!” manner — scars that unmask character identity, spells that span time — as to feel ham-fisted rather than mystical.

Director Vikram Bhatt previously made “Haunted 3D,” India’s first 3-D film, and “Dangerous Ishhq” was released in India in 3-D, although it is playing locally only in 2-D. While that explains such visually exciting but narratively nonsensical moments as a room full of elaborately exploding pottery, the jumbled storytelling couldn’t be helped by any technological enhancement.

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