Chal Mere Bhai is the story of two brothers, Vikram "Vicky" Oberoi (Sanjay Dutt) and Prem Oberoi (Salman Khan) and how their lives are turned upside down by a girl named Sapna (Karisma Kapoor).
Vicky is a business tycoon who runs his family's huge business empire. Sapna applies for the position of his secretary. She is an orphan who has just moved to Bombay from Pune and is currently living with her uncle and aunt and doesn't have the required experience to be Vicky's secretary, but Vicky's father, Balraj Oberoi (Dalip Tahil) is impressed by Sapna's passion and hires her.
Prem is an aspiring actor, much to the chagrin of Balraj, who would like Prem to also work for the family business. However, Prem's grandmother (Sushma Seth) and Vicky support Prem's decision to be an actor. He works with Sapna's uncle (Shakti Kapoor) who is a theater director.
Sapna is very inefficient at work and annoys Vicky constantly with her clumsy behavior and incompetence. But when Vicky is attacked after work, it is Sapna's fast thinking that saves his life. Vicky's family invite her and her family to a short vacation on their farmhouse.[4] Vicky's family become quite fond of Sapna. Prem and Sapna also fall in love during this time.
However, before Prem can tell his family that he loves Sapna, he finds out that his grandmother wants Vicky to marry Sapna and that Vicky has agreed to the proposal. Prem doesn't want to break his brother's heart. Vicky has been grieving for his late girlfriend, Piya (Sonali Bendre) for a very long time. Prem doesn't want to get in his way now that Vicky has finally decided to move on. Prem therefore falsely tells Sapna that he was just fooling around with her. A heartbroken Sapna gives in to the pressure of her aunt and uncle and agrees to marry Vicky. However, Vicky finds out the truth before the wedding and calls them out. Sapna and Prem are reunited at the end. The last scene implies that Vicky finds love again when a new girl, Pooja (Twinkle Khanna) joins his office.
According to the Indian trade website Box Office India, with around 12,00,000 units sold, this film's soundtrack was the year's fifteenth highest-selling.[5]
All lyrics are written by Nitin Raikwar, Sameer; all music is composed by Anand–Milind
The music featured in the top 15 best selling albums of 2000.[6]
Sharmila Taliculam of Rediff.com wrote that "Chal Mere Bhai is supposed to deliver a message on love, brotherhood, sacrifice and family values. But really, do you want to sit through another one? I suppose not. In that case, you can comfortably give this a miss".[7]Taran Adarsh of IndiaFM gave the film 1 star out of 5, writing opined that "Director David Dhawan should've chosen a better script to work on. Those going to watch a typical David Dhawan kind of a masala film are bound to be disappointed this time. The film lacks in substance, which is its biggest flaw.At the box-office, CHAL MERE BHAI has weak merits and will find the going tough."[8]
^Anustup Basu describes director David Dhawan's creation of a logically-impossible "composite visual world" for the Oberoi's farmhouse, e.g. at 58 mins., Prem drives away from the house in Maharashtra into a lush, green landscape with towering mountains behind, undoubtedly in Austria, given the two other duets with Karisma Kapoor are in Innsbruck and Salzburg, respectively. See Basu, "The Geo-televisual and Hindi Film in the Age of Information", in Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 82-83. ISBN9780748641024
Basu referenced the same scene in another publication, naming the landscape locale "Swiss", in "The Music of Intolerable Love: Political Conjugality in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se", in Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, eds., Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: Univ. of MN Press, 2008), 160.
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