David Chute (LA Weekly) ON JBJ

I earlier posted the NY Times review here..

JHOOM BARABAR JHOOM Now this is more like it: Flirtatious repartee between glamorous stars in travel-poster international locations; a gratifyingly simple plot with puzzles and sleight-of-hand surprises; and, at regular intervals, outbursts of gaudy, energetic dancing infectiously exploding. After a dispiriting series of summer films from both Hollywood and Bollywood that aimed at nothing more than fun and failed to achieve even that, Shaad Ali’s nutritious and filling (and glossy and sexy and inventive) Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is light entertainment so gratifyingly well crafted that it’s uplifting. It restores our faith in the high calling of making people feel good. The central romantic situation couldn’t be simpler: Preity Zinta and Abishek Bachchan, playing off each other like longtime sparring partners, are two strangers who meet at a café in London’s Waterloo Station while waiting for their respective fiancés. Or so they claim. But because JBJ distinctly resembles two other recent hits — Bunty aur Babli (which was made by the same producer-director team) and Bluffmaster — in both of which the dashing young Bachchan played high-stepping con artists — we can’t help squinting at the film’s flashbacks, searching for evidence of some elaborate hustle. (When the underlying agendas are revealed, they may seem to be a cheat in genre terms, but they reward our affection for the characters, and this is a higher code than the rules of any genre.) The entire last half hour of the film is one long blowout of a production number, a dance contest in Southall at which all the relationships are sorted out. Dancing, in fact, is the movie’s governing metaphor: The title translates as “Sway Baby Sway,” and it clearly refers not just to a dance step but to an attitude toward life. The dancer who expresses this best, in a running cameo appearance, is Bachchan’s father, veteran superstar Amitabh Bachchan, as a Greek-chorus-like street performer with hippie hair and a Technicolor dreamcoat, who effortlessly invests a minimalist, macho two-step with the attitude of a lifetime.