Movie Review: Student Of The Year

Now, now! Don’t get me wrong. I was scared. Scared out of my wits. But I knew I had to do it. It’s one of those things you do for love. True love. And so, I did it. And to my surprise, I came out alive. And quite well, if I may add.

Student Of The Year, or SOTY as it has become, famously paraded for the gaana wala song, isn’t half or or one third as bad as I expected it to be. It’s breezy, designer led, well-edited, and with a heavy dose of skin show and brawny muscular aspirational crap. And it’s watchable. No, its not Heroine. It’s not Kuch Kuch Hota Hai either.

The first fifteen minutes of this movie are crappy. Really crappy. I have heard people review the introductions of these bozos with aplomb, but they suck. But thankfully, the rest of the movie is not as bad. Once the grand introductions where the under-age lady pouts with all her colors, the first dude murders a guitar (what’s the guitar murder count of bollywood btw?), and the second dude goes on to prove why we are such a wannabe soccer country.

After that, thankfully, KJo moves on to school antics, banter, reasonably immature doucheness in a mega-douche school, group of friends-turned-enemies, school stuff, and finally, dumbledore’s triwizard tournament opens up.

To be fair, both the actors (Siddharth and Varun) have acted well, Siddharth acting a touch better than Varun. For all the Alia conversations, she is what our industry has reduced most actresses to – a showpiece. She pouts, sings, dances, sheds a tear here and there, and gets a total of 90 seconds of acting time in a 150 minute+ movie. And yeah, she does not act that well. But that hasn’t been a deterrent in bollywood either.

The support staff is actually better than the core, and have a reasonably high amount of screen presence. The start is a little off-key for Kaizaad (played by Kayoze Irani, son of Boman Irani) but he comes back very strongly. Manjot Singh is kinda wasted. Rishi Kapoor has not been used to the max, but is good in limited doses. Ronit roy and Ram Kapoor hang in there. Everyone else (including Farida Jalal) has a 1 minute deal in the movie and they’ve all done their bit to keep the movie interesting.An extremely interesting sidenote is the behavior of families behind these students who study at this insanely posh school. In a brilliant 2 minute window, KJo smartly demolishes a lot of the glitter that went into the school.

The music did t really work for me as much. Surprisingly, Gaana Wala Song is still the best song of the movie, followed by Radha/Ratta Maar. The remixes of old songs is fine, but only so much. But there are a few songs too many. But then, KJo indulges himself when he directs, and accepts so.

Everything else is irrelevant. It’s a long movie which does not bore you. You may hate the idea of watching it, but most likely you won’t hate watching it. It’s KJo’s bollywood grandeur at display. And it’s a movie that will make serious money, esp. overseas.  I am not exactly recommending you watch it, but I did come out not hating the movie.

Oh, by the way, the movie has too many bloopers. So. don’t bother thinking about them.