Half Girlfriend Film Review!

The Chetan Bhagat novel Half Girlfriend transcended to digital, directed by Mohit Suri was quite an interesting experience.

I caught the film a bit later than Friday and absolutely do not regret prolonging the day I got to see the film. I am diving into this film in full run, even still feeling bad for criticizing a filmmakers piece of work, but I must express my thoughts…

Half Girlfriend is a romantic drama which really just keeps defining the term ‘half girlfriend’ in many segments of the film in various cities through the same song in Hindi and English. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, I wasn’t taken into any special world and nor was there any point in the film that grasped onto my attention fully. Literally, everything was ‘adha-adha’ (50/50) in the film and it just kept adding onto defining what a half girlfriend is.

The acting appalled me. I have enjoyed a lot of Shraddha Kapoor’s films as far as her performance goes, and I have enjoyed Arjun Kapoor’s cutting edge look on-screen since Ishaqzaade, but there was not any point in this film where I was attached to either character or felt any sort of chemistry between the two. My eyes kept watching Arjun’s character, Madhav Jha run across various cities to tell his only love Riya played by Shraddha how much he loves her. And she constantly keeps placing him in this ‘half girlfriend’ zone. Honestly, it was an exhausting experience.

The music really irritated me… I have had the song Thodi Der on repeat since it released, but hearing it over and over again in both the Hindi and the English version in the film seemed as though they couldn’t afford to create any other tracks. Being a Mohit Suri film I would have expected a much greater variety of tracks.

I can’t seem to pinpoint what it was, but on a whole, there was something totally off in the film. It seemed to me to be a technicality flaw in the editing or cinematography. I cannot help, but to mention the horrible VFX placement of Bill Gates in a section of the film. There was absolutely no way I could focus on the so-called emotional speech presented by Arjun’s character because of this.

All in all, Half Girlfriend was a dragged out film that could easily have turned into a short film. I have not had a chance to read the original piece by Chetan Bhagat himself, but this was definitely a boring and exhausting film for me to watch.