Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri Review:
Malala Yousufzai might have braved the Taliban but I am sure she didn’t foresee a Kartik Aaryan. At a point in the tongue-twisty-titled rom-com Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri, Kartik’s Ray describes the width of his dating pool. “Malaika (Arora), Malala, Uorfi (Javed) or Kamala (Harris), nobody can say no to this momma’s boy,” he says while showcasing his six-pack abs and chiselled shoulder blades, as if he is auditioning for a whey protein commercial. If ever, in some parallel universe, there is a meet-cute between Malala and Ray on an exotic vacation, I don’t know how it will progress. Will he, in a lame-attempt at humour, call her ‘Maal La La’? Will he try to mansplain her the benefits of a burkini?
Cast: Kartik Aaryan, Ananya Panday, Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta
Directed by: Sameer Vidwans
Rating: 2 stars
If annoying was Ray’s character brief, Kartik plays it with perfection. Boy meets girl at the airport. Boy is Ray Mehra (Kartik), a rich, ripped wedding planner from the US whose travel personality is that of a pestering button-pusher. Girl is Rumi (Ananya Panday), a Hallmark-heroine whose idea of love hasn’t evolved beyond 90s Bollywood. She is an author with a book titled, ‘Love in Agra’ (She also owns a café called ‘Love Story’). It’s safe to assume she is a hopeless romantic.
Ray gets on Rumi’s, and the viewer’s, nerves from the get-go. The duo is travelling to Croatia for a ‘Yacht week’ and to not offend the genre gods of rom-com, Ray will get the seat next to Rumi on the flight. They will also have to share the last available cabin on a yacht. You get the gist. Ray’s dating strategy seems to be annoying a girl to the maximum limit, so that anything remotely pleasant he does afterward can be hailed as a he-is-a-good-guy-afterall cutesy gesture. But, as it always happens, two songs down and Rumi and Ray have fallen in love. Rumi, however, urges to call it quits since she can’t move with Ray to the US and in the process abandon her ex-Army officer father (Jackie Shroff), who is too attached to his motherland. Ray, who can’t wrap his head around no as an answer, thus lands in India to woo her back.
Tu Meri Main Tera… is essentially reheated DDLJ for the reel-swiping generation. The writing is so social-media coded for “youth-connect” that it feels corny and derivative. There are mentions of ‘pasandida aurat’, the TV show Friends, the long wait for season 5 of Stranger Things and an abysmal line which translates to “In between talks, you are sliding in the DMs of my eyes.” The film is riddled with references to 90s Bollywood flicks, there is another done-to-death rendition of the ‘palat’ scene from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), a 2025 take on the Medley Song from Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002) and a ‘Saat Samundar’ low-fi version which should be labelled as a blasphemy.
The Sameer Vidwans directorial from the house of Dharma has a warped sense of what clicks with the Gen Z. In a scene, Rumi, who professes the need for a “90s love story in a 2025 hookup culture”, passionately kisses Ray when he says (lies) that he is actually married. As a protagonist, a hero, Ray is impossible to bear. He is a classic red-flag who can’t help but give his opinion on everything, prides himself for being a ‘Momma’s boy’ and confuses narcissism as just a case of ‘I am sexy and I know it’. It would have helped if there was some convincing redemption to his arc but all he seems to be is an entitled man camouflaging as a new-age progressive.
There is, however, some uptick in the second half when the action shifts to India. Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta, as Ray’s ‘not a regular but cool mom’ Pinky, are enjoyable. From being a vacation romance the film devolves into a family melodrama with conflicts that seem forced. Tu Meri Main Tera… feels like a glossy, shiny Christmas present which is opened to reveal mere confetti. Or as Rumi perfectly describes Ray: nothing more than laughing gas.