Film: Good Boy Bad Boy

Director: Ashwini Chaudhary 

Cast: Emraan Hashmi,Tusshar Kapoor, Isha Sharwani, Tanushree Dutta, Paresh Rawal, Kabir Sadanand, Sushmita Mukherjee, Rakesh Bedi  

Rating: 1/5

Sometimes, life can be cruel to you, especially when you win a film ticket off a radio show and you realise it’s for a film like Good Boy Bad Boy.

This film is trite, excruciating and incredibly pointless. It’s a film that has no story whatsoever, unless you think good boys turning bad and bad boys turning good is something to make a film about.

Raju (Emraan Hashmi), like most bad boys, believes there is more to life than just studies; on the other hand, Rajan (Tusshar Kapoor) is the exact opposite. When the college principal Awasthi (Paresh Rawal) takes over the college, life is a living hell. With a little luck from above, the two boys swap classes and their lives. While the good boy is bad and the bad boy is good, education takes on a new meaning. Thrown in are the love interests; Dinky (Tanushree Dutta) loves Rajan and Raju is head over heels in love with Rashmi (Isha sharwani). Love succeeds and so do Raju and Rajan (guess who the loser is!).

For starters, the plot is non existent; two minutes into the film, you know how it’s going to end. The thin cord called the storyline, snaps and for over two hours, you fall into the emptiness until the lights are turned on. The characters are mind-bogglingly stereotyped. The good boy is sugar coated with goodness and the bad one, needless to say, carries a dagger. Even the other characters are not spared; the Bengali professor has the caricature look going and honestly, sounds like a confused result between a Bengali and an Arab stereotype.

With a title like that, the least you expect are witty lines that fill you with humour. The dialogues are inane and more often, carry a layered meaning. The energy and youthful essence that ideally the dialogues could have leveraged the movie with, in fact, make you cringe in your seat. The lack of good dialogues hampers the performances as well.

The camerawork is good, but just about. The production values, including Manoj Soni’s cinematography, is average. The lustre and textures in the film seem flat and missing to a large extent. The editing is side-splitting; scenes seem missing or incomplete very often. The split screen used at a certain point in the film has you in splits, as you really can’t figure out the necessity for such gimmicks. Sadly, even the music does nothing, unlike the other enchanting tracks Himesh Reshammiya creates each time. The direction by Chaudhary leaves you perplexed, wondering if it is the same person who directed the beautifully crafted film Dhoop.

Courtesy the lack of the fun element in the dialogues, the actors fail to deliver a great performance. Hashmi, Dutta (what was with the constant eye rolling?) and Kapoor are strictly ok and fall short of delivering a good acts. Sharwani seems lost and bored throughout. The only good performance is delivered by Paresh Rawal. His body language and rendering of lines are so immaculate that it only reinforces his stature as a great performer.

The film might just get a few laughs, but then, its box office ride won’t last a long while. The deficiency of a good plot and acting will be the prime reason for its poor show at the box office.

Even if you have the money to burn, you are better off putting it in a savings account. Good Boy Bad Boy is real poor fare, there is absolutely nothing this film offers, except a hole in your pocket.