Directed by Ashwini Chowdhary
Good Boy Bad Boy....or Dhoop Chaon ....Last I remember Ashwini Chowdhary had made a lovely sun-kissed film called Dhoop.
So what did we miss here? Good Boy Bad Boy is like a prescription to eternal cine-phobia. There's no reason why this film should've been made in the first place. And if it has been made, there's no valid reason for us to sit through the ordeal of 'Good Boy' Tusshar (oiled hair, buttoned-up shirt) taking on 'Bad Boy' Emraan (scruffy jeans, stubble, sundry sunglasses).
For a while the twosome frolic in the campus to Himesh Reshammiya's 'young' (read: noisy and breathy) tracks. Then they decide to join up and have fun. They do. We don't. Simple.
The campus is a textbook of idiocy. The teachers (flirty and buxom Sushmita Mukherjee and sundry clowns) are balanced out by principal Paresh Rawail who comes up with arguably his most unaccomplished performance in five years.
It's not that Paresh doesn't try to lend a credibility to his role of a principal trying to bring a sense of order of to a campus infested by punks and other street-vile types who don't seem to know how to hold a book right. And the only test they seem capable of passing is the HIV-positive one.
It's tough to tell what director Chowdhary hoped to achieve through this classroom of compulsive craziness. Maybe he wanted to make a Main Hoon Na of the punk generation. Maybe he wanted to build a pyramid of laughter out of youthful angst. Maybe he wanted us to forget he made Dhoop not too long ago.
The director fails on all counts, but one. It's easy to forget that this director had not too long ago displayed enough sensitivity to make us hopeful for his future.
What works is the principal casting. Tusshar and Hashmi are Good and Bad without trying too hard. But their efforts to remain true to 'tripe' defeats their very purpose of being in the film. The two leading ladies try to be glamorous and sassy.
Isha Shravani has lost a lot of weight, even on her face. Gone with the avoir- dupois is her ability to emote that we saw in Subhash Ghai's Kisna.
Tanushree Dutta is so badly styled you wonder what keeps her from toppling under the weight of her clumsiness.
Ditto the film.
Tackily produced and clumsily packaged Good Boy, etc is an embarrassment to producer Subhash Ghai.