Ali Larter Probably Wants Us To Forget This Bizarre Musical She Made Before Landman

Though she never achieved megastar status, Ali Larter has provided plenty of memorable moments throughout her career. Her whipped-cream bikini in “Varsity Blues” surely remains ingrained in the collective memory of an entire generation that came of age in the late ’90s, but many will also remember her for her role as Niki Sanders/Tracy Strauss on NBC’s “Heroes.” Larter also helped launch a major 2000s horror franchise with the “Final Destination” films, and today is known for playing Angela Norris, the lovably feisty wife of Billy Bob Thornton’s oil man Tommy Norris on “Landman.” But I think it’s safe to say almost nobody remembers her from “Marigold,” a bizarre Bollywood/Hollywood crossover musical that bombed its way into obscurity back in 2007.

We’ve seen some strange and downright upsetting attempts to meld Hollywood with its Indian counterpart over the years. Take Sylvester Stallone’s insane cameo in the Bollywood actioner “Kambakkht Ishq,” an attempt to bring the sensibilities of Indian moviemaking to the United States by shooting it at Universal Studios. It was strange to say the very least. But even “Kambakkht Ishq” wasn’t as weird or as unsuccessful as “Marigold.”

The 2007 romantic musical comedy starred Larter as an American actor who travels to India and becomes enchanted by Bollywood. Not only did this thing make less than $1 million at the global box office, but it also confounded critics, who simply weren’t buying the ill-conceived mashup.

Marigold was a bewildering fever dream of a Hollywood/Bollywood crossover

“Marigold” was writer-director Willard Carroll’s attempt to merge American rom-coms with the best of Bollywood. In a making-of featurette, Carroll explained how he traveled to India for a film festival and ended up falling in love with Bollywood films, claiming to have imbibed 150 different movies in six months as part of what he called his “Bollywood education.” After that, he found himself inspired to make a film of his own in India. “Marigold” was the result.

Carroll cast Ali Larter in the lead after working with her on a previous project. The actor plays Marigold Lexton, an actor who travels to India to shoot a film, only for the project to fall through. Soon, however, Marigold lands a small part in a musical, where she meets Salman Khan’s choreographer, Prem Rajput. In his making-of interview, Carroll recalled watching multiple films starring the Bollywood legend and being impressed with his “crossover appeal,” leading him to cast Khan opposite Larter

Soon, Marigold learns that Prem is actually a prince, because choreographers can be secret princes, and that’s just how this movie works. It doesn’t take long for the pair to fall for each other, but a revelation about Prem’s past soon tears them apart. There’s also plenty of song-and-dance numbers, all of which made for a bewildering experience that essentially boils down to Carroll living out a fever-dream fantasy of starring in Bollywood movies and falling in love with Salman Khan, I guess?

Marigold was not one of Ali Larter’s finest moments

The idea with “Marigold” was to marry Hollywood and Bollywood sensibilities to create something that appealed to audiences in both the United States and India. Unfortunately, the film was rejected by both. Critics weren’t too impressed, either, with “Marigold” maintaining a 31% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes to this day.

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a cross-cultural experiment that misfires” and evidently felt that Bollywood fans would “dismiss the mishmash as the work of an American director ‘slumming’ in a genre outside his own culture,” while Western audiences “unfamiliar with Hindi-language masala movies will find the whole thing puzzling.” Martin Hoyle of the Financial Times was a little more cutting in his review, noting how the film was less Bollywood-meets-Hollywood and more Bollywood meets “straight-to-video.” Indian critics didn’t let Willard Carroll off the hook, either. Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express accused the film of being “riddled with clichés,” and, in a delightfully grandiose piece of criticism, the Hindustan Times went so far as to describe the experience of watching this “Indo-American oddity” as “pretty close to facing death.”

If you do feel like staring death in the face, then you can find “Marigold” on YouTube for free in its entirety — though Ali Larter would probably rather you didn’t. Instead, if you’re yet to check out the incredibly popular “Landman,” now is the time to remedy that. The show is a ridiculously fun oil drama with one of Larter’s best performances, proving she was always destined for more than “Marigold.”