Tere bin Laden

This is a really funny, well made movie. The comic timing and the use of Punjabi dialogue makes the jokes even funnier.
A comedy with you-know-who’s name in the title may not be a natural sell in America, but it’s hard to imagine the likable, gently satiric Bollywood film “Tere Bin Laden” (“Without Bin Laden”) ruffling too many feathers.
Written and directed by Abhishek Sharma, the movie is set in Karachi, Pakistan, but was filmed mainly in India. It stars the popular pop singer Ali Zafar as Ali, a journalist whose dream is to go to, yep, America. Ali — he’s “good looking but a jackass,” we’re told in the first song — needs to earn money for a fake passport and hits upon this scheme: to trick an Osama bin Laden look-alike, a goofy fellow he meets at a cock-crowing contest, into making a video that can be sold to the news media.

The video, though, becomes too successful, and the United States panics. Suspecting the video came from Pakistan, it nonetheless attacks Afghanistan because, well, it can. Our hero and his crew are mortified and try to set things right by making another video.

Satire may be the point of “Tere Bin Laden,” but its low-key charm mostly comes from its dotty twist on the let’s-put-on-a-show plot as Ali and his eccentric helpers make their videos. (The film sags when it has to work out the story’s consequences.) And while it mocks the United States as a ham-fisted wielder of power (less sharply than, say, “Team America” did), America also remains Ali’s somewhere-over-the-rainbow place.

Mr. Zafar, handsome and with a deft comic touch, has all the makings of a Bollywood matinee idol, except for one thing: he’s Pakistani, and lead roles in Hindi movies are rare for Pakistani actors. (This may be a Bollywood first.) In any case, the folks back home won’t get a chance to see him shine: “Tere Bin Laden” was banned in Pakistan, where officials feared it might draw terrorist strikes.review from NYT