My Friend Pinto - Review

As regular as boy-meets-girl stories are becoming common for the regular movie-watcher, the spate of dark comedies and noir is becoming for the quirky movie-watcher. Interestingly, the same analogy applies to mindless comedies. You need to put your brain away to watch a Priyadarshan comedy or a David Dhawan film, almost as much as you need to keep your gray cells at bay to give up on the number of coincidences required to make a "separate threads collide" story. Only difference is that the latter has a zing in both cases, just because of the quirky treatment. And My Friend Pinto is just that amount of quirky, no more, no different. Just average in its genre.

It's not like there isn't enough meat in those disconnected threads or how they are played out. It is fun and cute, but it deviates from the chosen narrative-style a little way too often. What are pillow fights and people romantically flying in clouds doing in a film with the most unlikely underworld dons.

These dons they are rather eccentric as required by this type of films, but the portrayal is too cartoon-ish, too amateur to make an impact. The actors don't seem to help the cause either, the show very easily and a little too often slips into slapstick mode. Prateik Babbar is the protagonist, the village fool, the grown-up man who never grew up. And we are being treated to a night in his life where the craziest things happen to him. This one required no "performance" by him, he looked like the dumb/naïve person he plays in most other films (other than Jaane Tu...).

Kalki Koechlin barely has a role to play. I really liked her in the one song that she has with Prateik Babbar. That song has also been picturised very well. Watch out for the choreographed water splashing. It's an awesome visual.

Other than that My Friend Pinto, is as regular as it gets in the movies we can directly compare it to. We, of course, have seen worse films in general, but in this bracket, whatever My Friend Pinto has to show is covered, and whatever it has to say is too wishy-washy for the kind.