After making a splash with her debut feature 'Salaam Bombay', director Mira Nair tried to attract a wider audience with this strictly conventional (if pleasantly untraditional) cross-cultural romance. Denzel Washington plays a small town Mississippi janitor who charms (and is charmed by) the liberated daughter of an Indian political activist exiled from Idi Amin's Uganda. The conflicts between father and daughter are in fact more involving than the star-crossed love affair, and while it hardly follows any standard romantic formula there's still a discouraging sense of compromise to the film, in which likable but underwritten characters trade weak dialogue sounding all too often like the result of a bad translation. The cast is certainly attractive (if a little lopsided: Denzel Washington completely outclasses his co-stars), and the production is marked by a welcome lack of Hollywood gloss, most likely due to an unwelcome lack of a Hollywood budget. But in the end the film provides only a modest spark in an otherwise dim movie-going season.
Review of Mississippi Masala
