Despite its exotic setting and occasionally flashy technique, "Guru" is really just the oldie about the rube from the provinces who ventures to the Big Bad City in search of fame and fortune, only to fall under the spell of greed and corruption in his ruthless climb to the top. The twist here, though, is that the film is also a nationalistic David-and-Goliath tale of a man from the lower classes who takes on the entrenched corporate interests who use their collective power to keep men like him from sharing in the wealth. This leads to the rather bizarre, ethically dubious contention that it's okay to engage in corruption just as long as the people you are ripping off are demonstrably more corrupt than you are.

Ambitious in theme and epic in scope, the story spans a thirty year period, beginning in 1951 when Gurubhai Desai (Abhishek Bachchan) leaves his village to make a success of himself in the outside world, and ending in 1980 when he and his company are facing prosecution for fraud, tax evasion and a whole host of other unscrupulous business practices that are threatening to bring Desai's corporate empire crashing down around him.

Despite their undeniable virtues in other areas, Indian films are not generally noted for either their brevity or their emotional subtlety - and "Guru" is no exception in this regard. It suffers from an exhausting 155-minute running time as well as from a tendency to overstate its major plot and character points ad absurdum. When the people in the film are happy, they must be shown to be deliriously happy, dancing in the streets and throwing each other into the air to demonstrate their joy; when they are sad, angry, conniving or morally righteous, they behave in similarly emphatic and underlined ways, with A.R. Rahman's pumped-up, ear-pounding musical score wringing every remaining drop of subtlety and restraint out of the picture.

Still, I suppose this is all part of the Bollywood appeal, and there are certainly some notable virtues that make the film worth recommending. First of all, the film is visually stunning, with one beautifully framed image after another unfolding in multi-colored, kaleidoscopic splendor before us. Second, there is a certain old-fashioned freshness to the utterly unabashed and shameless way in which the movie traffics in purple prose melodrama, wearing its emotions so transparently on its sleeves that it purges the story of all possible archness or coyness. (Think of it as a Douglas Sirk production with saris). Finally, as with virtually all commercial Indian films, "Guru" is decked out with a generous helping of lively, though admittedly quite corny, song-and-dance numbers that wind up "stopping the show" in both the best and worst senses of that phrase. For fun as these musical sequences are to watch, they do lead one to wonder if all the money that Indian producers so generously lavish on choreographers might not, in fact, be more wisely spent on a few judicious editors instead.