Critics’ Verdict: ‘Half Girlfriend’ Is as Bad as Its Trailer Was

Critics aren’t fully loving Mohit Suri’s ‘Half Girlfriend’.

Film: Half Girlfriend
Director: Mohit Suri
Cast: Arjun Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Vikrant Massey, Seema Biswas

Excerpts from the reviews of Half Girlfriend:

Arjun Kapoor plays this lousy protagonist in a lumbering manner, slackjawed, forever nodding his head, and - in a misguided attempt to look simple - blankly smiling ear to ear. Shraddha Kapoor is Riya, shrill and insubstantial, one of the film’s many characters who insist on speaking in English without being good at it. Half Girlfriend is about two halfwits who belong together. It is a film that claims to celebrate romance and undying passion and gates both Bill and Indian, but all it does is applaud a spoilt man who believes he’s a scapegoat. He is not. He is, in fact, a man who hands the woman he loves a butcher knife, gets down on all fours, sticks his neck over a earthen pot of biryani and goes baaaaa. Off with his head.

Raja Sen (Ndtv.com)

Arjun Kapoor’s expressions make sudden shifts, and the changing length of his beard ensures you notice this even more. He’s described himself as the “quintessential Chetan Bhagat hero”, but Madhav Jha is not heroic and Kapoor plays him like a nothing more than a country bumpkin and stalker. As for the part of Riya, any twenty-something actress could have pulled off this two dimensional part. Mohit Suri keeps the narrative ticking along at a steady pace, though surprisingly for a Suri film, the music is a let down. The costumes loudly proclaim “wealthy, urban” versus “provincial, simple”. A great deal of effort has gone into making the basketball scenes authentic. If only some of that had gone into improving the dialogue, especially the incredibly awkward English lines, and Arjun Kapoor’s Bihari accent. Half Girlfriend is strictly for fans of the book or the two leads, because at best it’s quarter tolerable.

Udita Jhunjhunwala (Firstpost.com)

The movie remains cold and manipulative, and far too heavily dependent on Raju Singh’s swooning soundtrack to suggest emotional depth. The leads are not capable of suggesting the grand emotions at work, and whenever Suri wants to tug at heart strings, he cuts to a song.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll.in)