Good Boy Review

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” goes a popular line. That’s all very fine, but if the coiner of this adage had gone to watch Good Boy, he would be yapping like a granny who’s popped back from her grave.

Good Boy is the story of a boy-next-door who falls in love with the reigning neighborhood beauty. Navneet is a college-goer who shows so much skin, you actually wonder if she has more of it than the average female. She goes to class in bikini tops, and like a mighty lion dodging off a pack of hyenas, bumps off salivating guys with a mere swerve of her hips (which also seem to be covered with a LOT OF SKIN).

Meanwhile, Rohit comes hanging his tongue out as well, and she leads him on because – get a load of this – she does not have the patience to tell him she does not love him. So Rohit goes into a spin fantasizing about her as his future wife and kissing her when she permits it (which she does because she again does not have the patience to refuse), and finally lands up at her house one fine day.

This is when she suddenly decides it’s gone on for too long, and musters up the required patience to tell Rohit to go suck eggs. Rohit is disappointed and tries to approach her again, and is rejected again, and drags her to court, and is defeated in the case, and yada yada yada …till he finally decides to “become IAS”.

Unfortunately IAS does not mean ‘InAccesSible’, though it would have done a lot of good to both Krishnaveni and me, the audience. It is the Indian Administrative Service, of course. And after initial attempts to beat his ambitions into the ground like a tenterhook fail, the whole city rises up wholeheartedly to support this quintessential roadside Romeo.

So there you have it. A sweet little story of the boy next door who mends his erring ways to win the heart of the girl next door. It just might have worked if Rohit and Navneet looked a little more like their characters and less like a galli ka goonda and a B-grade movie vamp respectively.

Rohit manages to look the guy who would keep you off getting into an RTC bus if you spotted him in the window. With scraggy hair and an unshaven face, he runs around behind Navneet for most of the movie. The director takes the easy way out by pasting songs over the otherwise tough-to-handle sequences, and so Rohit sings a song each in his examination hall, in the courtroom, in her college, in his college, in his house and in all other place left.

There is nothing really ridiculous about this movie, nothing that really really sticks out like a sore thumb, except the fact that you’ve gone to the theater to watch it. Otherwise, the movie just jumps from one mediocrity to another. It follows the soporific golden mean of dumbness, the kind you can take a snooze through and leave refreshed. It’s only if you deliberately choose to keep your senses on the alert throughout that you will feel the urge to rant.

That, of course, we presume you are not going to do after reading this review, but hang on, that’s not all there is to the verdict. Don’t just sleep through this movie – skip it all together. Amen.