By Taran Adarsh, February 14, 2003 - 13:37 IST

Dev Anand's LOVE AT TIMES SQUARE is set in the U.S. It tells the story of two young men [Shoeb Khan, Chaitanya Chaudhry] and a girl [Heenee Kaushik], all Indian, with their emotional roots in India.

One of the boys works as a computer engineer in Silicon Valley, California, and the other, who hails from a middle class family in India, has come to the States to try his luck.

The girl is doing her Mass Communication Course in an American University. She is the daughter of a billionaire Indian. Both young men fall head over heels in love with the girl. Who gets the girl eventually, forms the climax of the story.

Like his previous films, LOVE AT TIMES SQUARE focuses on Dev Anand and Dev Anand only. Of course, there's a love story, besides a track of the gangsters, plus the September 11 incident, but neither the love story, nor the gangsters' track are able to infuse life in the narrative.

LOVE AT TIMES SQUARE has a screenplay of convenience. The story jumps from one incident to another without any strong reason and the outcome is a mishmash of several incidents put together.

There's hardly any movement in the first half of the film. The Salman Khan song in the initial reels could've proved to be a major attraction, but its picturisation seems like a rushed job. Also, the set on which this number is picturised is tacky.

Even the love story – two boys falling in love with one girl – shows no movement in the first half. It is only towards the second half that things get moving, but too many tracks – specially the Ashish Vidyarthi track – looks forced and completely out of place.