You might think that Action Replayy (2010), in which a young man travels back to 1975 in order to save his parents' relationship, is the Bollywood remake of Back to the Future, but director Viprul Ameutlal Shah insists that it's actually adapted from H. G. Wells's conveniently public domain The Time Machine, and has nothing whatsoever to do with any Hollywood film franchises involving time-traveling DeLoreans and Michael J. Fox kissing his mom. If that's true, then I am deeply disappointed by the lack of Morlocks.
Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) loves Tanya (Sudeepa Singh.) Tanya loves Bunty. She's ready to get married, but Bunty won't even think of it, because his own parents, Kishen and Mala (Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, both in terrible old age makeup), have a dysfunctional nightmare of a marriage. Everything comes to a head at Kishen and Mala's thirty fifth wedding anniversary party, when Mala's old friend (and Kishen's old bully) Kundanlal (Rannvijay Singh) crashes the party and casually humiliates Kishen, while all the assembled guests (and Mala) laugh. Once the guests leave, the unhappy couple start talking about divorce. Then they start shouting about divorce.
Tanya was raised by her grandfather, Anthony Gonsalves (Randhir Kapoor), who happens to be an eccentric scientist and therefore has an experimental time machine in his basement. (And to the director's credit, the time machine looks very much Wells's time machine is normally depicted, and nothing at all like a DeLorean.) Bunty "borrows" the time machine and heads back to 1975, determined to make his parents fall in love with each other.
There are obstacles. Obstacle number one: 1975 Kishen is . . . a nerd. Obstacle number two: 1975 Mala is a mean tomboy, and every bit as much of a bully as Kundanlal. Obstacle number three: oh yea, Kundanlal. He's around and a huge jerk. And obstacle number - well, the other main problem is that Mala's mother (Kirron Kher) and Kishen's father (Om Puri) hate each other, so they will be no help.
Still, Bunty tries his best to nudge his parents toward one another, and it ends in humiliating failure. The good news is that both his parents are prompted to (separately) tell Bunty their tragic backstories, giving him genuine insight into what they've suffered and how they became the people they are, which will help him to manipulate them in the future. The bad news is that along the way Bunty accidentally made Kundanlal fall in love with Mala, so Kishan now has a rival, and suddenly it's looking likely that Kishen and Mala won't get married at all. Meanwhile, Mala's sassy galpal Mona (Neha Dhupia) has fallen in love with Bunty. (The power of love is a curious thing.)
Take two. Bunty gives Kishen a long-overdue makeover (Montage? Montage.) and teaches him to act cool. Then, once Mala is paying attention, Bunty orders Kishen to act aloof and ignore her, so that she will fall in love out of jealousy. It's skeezy and manipulative, though to be fair it's still less creepy than some of the stuff Marty McFly comes up with.
I love blatant Bollywood ripoffs of Hollywood movies, because I'm always fascinated by what changes during the adaptation process. Action Replayy is no exception. The emotional core of the Back to the Future movies is Marty's friendship with Doc Brown, but Bunty and Gonsalves barely know one another. Yeah, 1975 Gonsalves fixes the time machine, enabling Bunty to get back to the future, but he does so almost entirely offscreen. Instead, the focus is on Bunty getting to know his parents and learning to appreciate them as people, and teaching them to appreciate each other as people in the process. (Granted, he does that by toying with their emotions, but nobody's perfect.)
Despite the director's protests, the inspiration for Action Replayy is blindingly obvious, but the end result is still very different.
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