They get funny and entertaining, too, at least for some while. Let's make no bones about this: Good Bad Ugly is nonsense on toast - naansense, if you wanted to be culturally specific - but in no other form of contemporary cinema has the phrase "what if" been seen to hold such sway. What if a 53-year-old man could be observed kicking seven bells out of men thirty years his junior? What if the latter group were dressed like characters rejected from Scarface for being a bit much? What if we disguised AK in leather-bar garb for a meeting with money launderers? What if those money launderers did their bidding in a What'sApp groupchat headed "DARK WORLD"? What if their casino hangout had a microwave in the middle of it, which our hero could then toss a bomb inside? What if that hero had a gun disguised as a Box Brownie camera? It's like a story an eight-year-old would make up about themselves and their friends - which may explain the comic-book panels that sporadically pop up, and the action figures on AK's table, and the Korean heavy with the Hello Kitty phone. (It may also explain the cuts the film's UK distributor made at the end of Week One, softening a 15 certificate movie to a family-oriented 12A.) That's the source of GBU's appeal: the possibilities are endless. (One scene ends with Kumar casually chatting to the camera crew.) It also struck me as GBU's limitation: like a kid hopped up on Skittles, it eventually tires itself out, and exhausts those of us who aren't hardcore fans with it. Director Adhik Ravichandran and his six-strong team (I'm tempted to say creche) of writers have their strongest ideas in the first half; in the absence of anything like a coherent, thought-through plot, the supply of Super-Cool Things for Our Hero To Do runs thin after the intermission. The second half really does suggest the star and his entourage took a nice European break, during which some killjoy occasionally pulled out a camera and some prop guns and insisted AK film something for the fanclub. The prevailing air of daftness remains rather charming, though: it's the first Indian film I've seen to remind me of both John Wick and the Status Quo lark Bula Quo!.
Good Bad Ugly is now playing in selected cinemas.
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