Be they vital pop cultural imports or kitsch curios, it was only a matter of time before the influence of India's all-purpose musicals for the masses slowly began to rise beyond the bootleg-tape circuit. Those colorful, lavishly choreographed numbers in the popular karaoke fest Moulin Rouge owed much more to Bollywood than to Busby Berkeley or Arthur Freed, and once Madonna started sporting henna chic, mainstream crossover actually seemed plausible, if not possible.

Enter Lagaan, a runaway hit in India and England that seems Bollywood's best bid for full-scale American attention. The path has slowly been paved, and as an introduction to the genre, you could hardly do better: extravagant musical interludes, syrupy-sweet romantic love triangles, wide-screen scoops of historical flair, the occasional broad comic moment, heroic and impossibly photogenic leads, above-average production values. Open your Bollywood primers to page one and inhale that carbon smell of freshly unearthed cinematic highs.

India, 1893. The British Empire is deep in its colonial rule of the country, and in a small village, drought and lagaan (the tributary tax paid to the rajas, who in turn pay their provincial English masters) are sapping the villagers' morale. When the town's population, led by local rabble-rouser Bhuvan (Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan), protests that the taxes are bleeding everyone dry during this time of famine, the sadistic British captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne) proposes a bet: beat the captain's team in a "friendly" game of cricket, and no taxes for three years. Lose, and the entire countryside will pay triple the fee.

Of course, anyone who has seen a sports/romance/action feel-good movie of the summer can predict what happens next. The ragtag group of athletes can't seem to get their game together, until Bhuvan suddenly sees advantages in several villagers' offbeat quirks and eccentricities. A friendly Englishwoman (Rachel Shelley) with goo-goo eyes for Bhuvan threatens to derail the budding romance between the would-be cricketer and his sweetheart (Gracy Singh). A jealous suitor betrays the team, with near-disastrous results. Elaborately choreographed sing-alongs pop up without provocation. And the final match, which takes up a third of the film's four-hour length, deals squarely in the currency of comeuppance.

But the fun of Lagaan, like so much of Bollywood's output, doesn't lie in deciphering narrative meanings as much as in dusting off the suspension of disbelief needed for much of Hollywood's golden-age bonanzas. It's not the tale but the storytelling spectacle in its most pure of visceral forms that hooks you as it zings past your optic nerves in a stylistic Morse code. Primary colors whirl, congeal, and separate. People breaking into show-tune scores and pop hits, choreographed for maximum spectator enjoyment, seem as natural as breathing. The film's subtitle over here is Once upon a Time in India, and director Ashutosh Gowariker imbues his Indian cricketers with the same mythic, larger-than-life stature that Leone gave his gunfighters and gangsters or Tsui Hark his warriors. It's not cinema as much as über-cinema, set up to be laid out and consumed in a shorthand vocabulary and broad helpings while washing over hapless, smiling viewers.

Imperialism naturally gets a sound turn over the spit, with the British villains one second away from twirling their mustaches and tying heroines to railroad tracks. Blackthorn's Captain Russell, resembling Pierce Brosnan dipped in cooking oil, seems lifted from any number of gaslight melodramas, slithering over his vowels and consonants like he's waiting for audiences to hiss. But the choice of a sport so associated with British class systems and prep school privilege lends an edge to the Indian resistance's method of using the dominant culture's tools against it. To the arrogant English, it's an assimilation nightmare; once their building blocks of "civilization" are taken over, what gives their culture the right to dominate? Hollywood, are you listening?