Director
Siddharth Sengupta
Cast
Janhvi Kapoor, Deepak Dobriyal, Mita Vasisht, Neeraj Sood, Sushant Singh
What’s The Story
‘Good Luck Jerry’ is the official remake of the Tamil movie ‘Kolamaavu Kokila’. The film's story is centred around a happy-go-lucky young girl, Janhvi Kapoor, who gets involved in a drug racket to earn money in a short time. Unfortunately, the circumstances bring her entire family into the drug smuggling business. Lots of twists and turns come into her life making the film an interesting thriller. With a drugs angle to the film, and a gang of thugs after Janhvi Kapoor, the film has her pulling a fast one to sidestep them. Will she be able to save herself? Or will she fall into a trap in the web of the underworld? Well, you’ll have to watch the film to find out.
Watch Trailer
What’s Good
Brilliant Dark Comedy
Dark comedy as a genre is too hard to pull off and not many filmmakers attempt it. Kudos to Siddharth Sengupta for managing to attempt a dark comedy in the garb of a thriller. The way he has taken the screenplay forward is commendable as there are numerous twists and turns which will keep you hooked till the very end.
Despite the music not having done great in the music charts on various FM channels, the songs were surprisingly good. Composed by Parag Chhabra and written by Raj Shekhar, songs like ‘Paracetamol’, ‘Cutie Cutie’ and ‘Jhand Ba’ are definitely catchy and stick on to you.
Among the actors, Deepak Dobriyal is brilliant even in the minimal screen time that he has. The character is a heightened version of Pappi from ‘Tanu Weds Manu’ combined with Gopi from ‘Angrezi Medium’. Dobriyal is crazily funny every time he appears on the screen. With his unique antics and red-dyed hair, he manages to bring a unique flavour that only he can bring to the table. The way he switches from being the happy-go-lucky guy to the scared-to-bits guy in a fraction of seconds during the climax is too good to watch.
The other supporting cast comprising of stellar actors like Mita Vashisht, Neeraj Sood, Sushant Singh, and Saurabh Sachdeva is decently impressive in this ensemble even though their characters don’t have enough time on screen.
What’s Bad
Janhvi Kapoor’s Innocence Isn’t Saleable
Janhvi Kapoor is playing the character of a bimbo-with-brains, whose basic criterion is that she looks so innocent that no one can doubt or question her, even when she is transporting drugs. Sadly, Kapoor hasn’t managed to look that convincingly innocent.
Prakash Chandra Sahoo and Zubin Sheikh, in an attempt to keep the movie to under two hours, have not allowed the characters to be delved into. The stories of the individual characters are shown so less that, as an audience, before you get invested in the characters, the film gets over. It looks more like a part of a larger film or maybe a chapter in a bigger scheme of things.
Rangarajan Ramabadran’s cinematography is too lacklustre to create an impact. A lot of the night and indoor scenes are not well lit. To add to that the climax where there are bullets flying everywhere is very difficult to keep a track of who’s shooting at whom. The camera work shouldn’t have let such doubts crop up in the minds of the viewers.
Verdict
Watch this for director Siddharth Sengupta’s brilliant take on dark comedy. Also, Deepak Dobriyal’s antics make this funny every time he is onscreen. It’s indeed an average One-Time Watch. I am going with 2.5 stars.
