Half Girlfriend: Everything here is half

Cast: Arjun Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Rhea Chakraborty

Rated: 3/10

Half Girlfriend is as pathetic as the face of Bill Gates shown in the film. Not just pathetic, this Arjun Kapoor-Shraddha Kapoor starrer, which came with a lot of weight, and we are not talking about Arjun’s body mass here, is a confused, slow, anti-romance. A Bihari boy in love with a rich Delhi girl who has domestic violence issues at home was doomed from the very start, only director Mohit Suri failed to see it.

Yes, he does create drama but gets carried away with it, to disastrous fallouts. Based on celeb writer Chetan Bhagat’s novel of the same name, the film desperately looks for a way out of the existential mess it creates pretty early into the sequence. And what was it with Shraddha? She wears crazy clothes, plays bad basketball, walks like a zombie in the rain and carries a guitar on her slight back without playing it much. She also has dreams, that of being a solo singer in a New York jazz bar, but all she manages to do with conviction throughout the film is tick you off.

Coming to Arjun Kapoor. The hulk behaves as if he left his brains behind in his gaon. A puppy kind of love in a yuppy kind of world, that too by a man who is tall, dark and, well, fat, has no life and Arjun not even once tries to overcome this DNA fault in his character and consequently in the film.

Together, the two mess up the proceedings in this awkward love story between the world’s worst matched couple who keep flitting (separately of course) from Bihar to Delhi to Bihar to New York without rhyme or reason. And if jobs with the Bill Gates Foundation are so easy to get, one wouldn’t mind getting lovelorn and reason shorn, as Arjun is in the film.

Come to think of it, everything here is half — from the girlfriend to the story, to it execution. Bollywood, it’s time you got your romance right. Otherwise, it is getting to be quite a heartbreak for the audience.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 21 May, 2017