Genre: Drama / Musical / Romance
Rating: PG
Starring: Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, & Paul Blackthorne
Released: 2001

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One of my friends recommended this movie to me as being a great Indian movie to watch. I told him I would give it a shot and queued it up on Netflix. When I got it, I pulled it out and noticed the title, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, reminding me of another ?Once Upon a Time? movie. And then I looked at the runtime, 224 minutes! That is only 5 minutes shorter than Once Upon a Time in America. I would assume this is not a coincidence.

The basic premise is that the British empire in India is corrupt and are trying to get the villagers of a poor drought ridden part of the country to pay double lagaan (land tax in Hindi). There is one man, Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) who will not stand for this injustice. He confronts the provincial leader, Captain Russell (Blackthorne). Russell states that he is willing to revoke all the taxes if the villagers can create a team that can beat the British in a game of Cricket.

You can get a good idea of how the story plays out, but there are some quirks that make this movie pretty interesting. Cricket is a large part of this movie (the final 45 minutes of the movie is almost exclusively scenes from the three-day cricket match). My friend has been trying to show me how to play cricket (which has been about as successful as my attempts to show him baseball), thus this movie was actually quite informational as well as enjoyable. It may be useful to read a bit on the rules ahead of time if you do care to watch this film as it will make the scenes when they play moderately understandable.

Overall the movie was very enjoyable. The storyline was compelling and the songs were well mixed into the script. My only wish is that I knew some Hindi as reading subtitles during both dialog and songs detracts from the visual elements of the movie. However, that is clearly not a fault of the movie. On a side note, I found it interesting at the anti-British sentiment that the movie tends to portray. I believe that is present in Indian culture in general, which for me was unexpected. Give this a chance and I think you will be pleasantly surprised.