He's Hitch, but in reverse – rather than putting couples together, he rends them apart. Such is the job of Amir (Samrat Chakrabarti) in Amyn Kaderali's Kissing Cousins. He acts as an intermediary for a member of a couple looking to dispose of their significant other, someone who can't deal with the emotional entanglement. He is also one of the few good characters in a less than satisfying film.
Amir's job – an outgrowth of past emotional turmoil – keeps him from having a real relationship, something he doesn't seem to mind terribly, until his best friend, Charlie (Zack Ward), returns from abroad with a new outlook on life and a fiancée in tow. Charlie refuses to let Amir be the best man at Charlie's wedding due to his "bad relationship karma," and Amir's stagnating life takes a turn for the worst… without someone to spend Thanksgiving with, he's forced to – horror of horrors – go home and spend it with his family.
From there this low-budget comedy takes a turn for the worse as Amir finds that his family has all but forgotten about him. He winds up taking his visiting cousin, Zara (Rebecca Hazlewood) back to Los Angeles with him, and, as if the title didn't give it away, the two find themselves quickly becoming couple-esque. What started as a joke on his friends turns almost semi-real and the blood relatives are disgusted with one another just in time to return to Amir's family for Christmas.
The film is not well acted, and the appearances of David Alan Grier (Amir's neighbor) and Jaleel White (the soon-to-be father of Amir's sister's baby) in the film is terribly puzzling. Neither has a large role (nor are they quite cameos), neither character is a stand-out, and neither performs brilliantly. Like so much of the film, one can only assume that there was some sort of great idea behind them being there, and that – like the rest of the film – the idea didn't quite turn into reality.
As it is made quite clear that Amir and Zara are in fact cousins, that relationship is headed nowhere, even if both of them might momentarily be interested in it being more than it is. Because the relationship can't progress and there's only one other single girl in the entire film, from the first frame the audience knows exactly where Amir is going to be at the end of the film. The only trick is disposing of Zara so that she's not alone by the time the credits roll, and that trick, like so much of the film, simply feels false.
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