There hasn’t been another film, at least not in this past year or so, during which I can recall having groaned with quite as much feeling and as frequently as I did while watching Mohit Suri’s (Woh Lamhe, Ek Villain) new Half Girlfriend. I’d seen the promos, of course, and had tried to brace myself for a bad time, really I did, but turns out I’d underestimated just how much of a bad time it would be. Because it was. Ridiculously, unforgivably bad. To the point where knowing I’m meant to rehash the entire fiasco for the purposes of this review is making me slightly queasy. So, let’s get this over with, shall we?

Half Girlfriend, you’ll probably know, is a screen adaptation of yet another of author Chetan Bhagat’s bestselling (like there’s any other sort) novels. Truly, the man churns this stuff out like there’s no tomorrow; much in the spirit of a desi Nicholas Sparks, it’s gotten so that he might as well skip the book and go straight to writing screenplays, which—according to people who’ve actually read Half Girlfriend, unlike yours truly—is already a pretty accurate description of the source material in this case. But whether you’re Team Bhagat or not, you can’t deny that his books have provided fodder for some good films like 3 Idiots and Kai Po Che. This new one, however, with its half-witted plotlines, half-baked performances and half-hearted production design, would never make that list, I’ll “half” you know.

I’ll stop that now.

Our protagonist is young college-goer Madhav Jha (Arjun Kapoor, because who better to play a “college-goer”?), who has just travelled from his native Bihar to Delhi to attend the prestigious St Steven’s (yes, with a V) College. Although he’s initially dithering about whether the move to the city was a good idea—his English is rather poor, you see, and it’s given him an inferiority complex the size of the moon around the visibly cosmopolitan lot who populate the college—a chance meeting on the basketball court with one of their members, the lovely, overly-talented Riya Somani (Shraddha Kapoor), convinces him to stay. The two strike up a speedy friendship over sports, and are soon hanging out on the regular to play basketball. Needless to say, Madhav is head over heels. What’s more,

Riya doesn’t seem entirely indifferent to him, either, which raises his hopes that he might, at some point, be allowed to call her his girlfriend. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

When Madhav opens up to her about his feelings, Riya tells him she’s not ready for that kind of commitment, but offers to be his “half-girlfriend”, basically a rather less-poetic way of saying she wants to be friends with benefits. But exactly what those benefits constitute becomes a point of contention between them—and it all blows up one day, when she visits him in his dorm room. Madhav is certain that this means they’re about to move up a couple of bases, but when she makes it clear that she wants to take it slow, his reaction is, well, just plain heinous any way you look at it. But, and it is here that I completely detached from the story, never once is this assault satisfactorily dissected or denounced in the film; in fact, at a latter stage, there’s actually an effort to brush it off.

And so, as you go through the second half of this stupid movie—which largely comprises scenes of Madhav pining for Riya and running, pining and running—you can’t get rid of that twisty feeling in your gut, the sort of thing you might experience when watching older, and considerably-less-enlightened-on-gender-politics, films: except Half Girlfriend was made in 2017 and really has no excuse.

There’s also a very obvious, and desperate, effort here to make a statement of some sort, against the hegemony of English, for rural empowerment, cultural preservation, etc, etc, but it’s all such an insincere and simplistic mish-mash of semi-patriotic clichés—including a blatant stamp of approval for the Indian government’s “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” scheme—that nothing really sticks. It all is also somewhat undone by the script’s parallel need to validate the protagonists’ achievements by showing white people fawning over them excessively—at one point, an American woman says, “Madhav Jha is not a name, Madhav Jha is an attitude” sans irony. And Half Girlfriend’s shallowness and lack of substance is only matched by its lack of logic: it relies so heavily on dubious bouts of serendipity and coincidence that you eventually have to stop trying to make sense of the plot if only to keep your sanity.

The only way this film could’ve been salvaged was if both the Kapoors had been able to pull out some impressive performances, even just a sliver of chemistry—the last film to be based on a Bhagat novel, 2 States, also starring Arjun Kapoor, had some of the latter at least—but it’s a no on both counts here. Ms Kapoor once more steps into those Manic Pixie Dream Girl shoes she’s tried on so many times before—she sneaks to the top of India Gate to let off steam, tight security be damned! She likes walking in the rain!

She wants to sing at a jazz club in New York!—but they still don’t make for a convincing fit.

But, of course, due blame must be apportioned to the people responsible for writing up such an unimaginative character. The same, however, can’t be said in the case of Mr Kapoor, who is just insufferable here, barely bothering to emote, his forced “Bihari” accent all over the place, inauthentic as can be. The film also features a number of second-tier actors who basically serve the purpose of title cards, dishing up exposition by the shovelful.  

There’s more, a lot more. I could talk about the wall-to-wall background score, courtesy of a whole bunch of music directors that tries to tell you exactly how to feel and barely lets in a moment of silence. I haven’t even touched on the Bill Gates “cameo” in the film that you just have to see to believe. But I don’t think I need to go any further; it should be pretty apparent by now that I think Half Girlfriend isn’t worth your time. A half-star for a half-baked film.