'Kites': Crime is not on their side

With a 215-screen opening making this the widest American release of a Bollywood picture - those famously colorful, three-hour-long, genre-mixing musical extravaganzas from India - "Kites," ironically, is not your typical Bollywood picture. Shot and set in Las Vegas and the American Southwest, only a smidge over two hours long and with just one dance number, this romantic melodrama of a star-crossed Hindi hustler and a Mexican gold digger is as much a big-screen telenovela as it is anything else.

As befits both forms, the story is the stuff Old Hollywood tearjerkers are made of. Single-letter lover boy J. (Hrithik Roshan) is a dance teacher who supplements his income by marrying immigrant women to get them green cards. When Gina (Kangana Ranaut), daughter of a rich, ruthless casino owner (Kabir Bedi), decides she wants the handsome hunk, J. figures he's hit the jackpot. So what if he doesn't love her?

Things turn deadly complicated when J. recognizes Natasha (Bárbara Mori, star of the Mexican telenovela "Rubí"), the fiancee of Gina's homicidal brother Tony (Nick Brown). She's really Linda, the last of J.'s faux wives, and likewise marrying for money. Fated to be together, J. and Linda try to flee the long tentacles of the criminal emptire of Tony's family.

That doesn't go well, but it does go with gorgeously photographed desert vistas, improbable escapes, non-CGI car crashes, swipes from Charlie Chaplin and "Thelma and Louise," and a boldly old-fashioned, I'll-die-without-you, nobly self-sacrificing movie romance.