3 Idiots Review

Hirani's trick is to hide a thesis inside a farce and never let the thesis slow the jokes down. The Imperial College of Engineering is drawn as a pressure cooker with a body count, and the film keeps returning to that cost without turning grim: Joy Lobo's suicide, Raju's paralysed father and the Virus's stopwatch are all played straight in a movie that also contains a fake wedding speech and a urination gag. Aamir Khan plays Rancho as a fixed point rather than an arc, which works because the two friends around him are the ones who change, and Boman Irani gives the antagonist a lisp and a wound instead of a sneer.

The runtime is structured as a road trip with flashbacks, so the question of who Rancho actually is stays live to the last reel. All Izz Well does the emotional bookkeeping the dialogue is too busy to do. It softens at the end and the final act's coincidences are large, but almost nothing in popular Indian cinema this decade has been argued as clearly or laughed at as hard.