[Movie Review] Student of the Year: Same Old Wine in New Bottle

Cast: Varun Dhawan, Siddharth Malhotra, Alia Bhatt, Ronit Roy, Rishi   Kapoor

Director: Karan Johar

Love, friendship, jealousy, betrayal, ambitions and blah and blah! Student of the Year is one mashup of feelings that seems intangible at first, but is ultimately driven to its home by the charm of the veteran director, Karan Johar. Yeah, it often feels aimless, sometimes becomes too silly to be taken seriously, but then it provides one thing that we always have an apetite for, and that too in ample dosage, Entertainment!

The Richie Rich dude, Rohan (Varun Dhawan) meets the innocent eyed attitude queen, Shanaya Singhania (Alia Bhatt) and then the queen bumps into another guy, Abhimanyu (Siddharth Malhotra) and, then and there, comes the baap of all glitches entwined with relationships and lovey-dovey stuffs, Complications! Rewind a bit and cover this all up in a background of the fiction fantasy school and a coveted trophy to die for, you’ll get what Student of the Year is all about.

Every single frame carries the trademark Johar stamp. Right from the lush aesthetics and the designer clothes to the discos and even the narrative of the movie, conveyed of the authority that the man behind the camera has on his acts. He manages to extract the best from his cast and crew, be it the cinematographer or the three debutants, who shine in their individual roles and definitely have a successful road ahead of them.

It may be that the debutants end up as the scene steelers, but it is Rishi Kapoor, Dean of the St.Teresa Institution, who gives another masterful and heart-warming performance. He is indeed, a class apart! Barring a few old jelly bellys, the music by Vishal-Shekhar, sets the tempo right for the events unfurling on the screen.

Karan Johar may have hit gold in many departments, but it is the lame script of the movie that is its arch enemy. Thousands of times the formula of a triangle had been rehashed in Bollywood and Student of the Year, despite of all its new-age mantra, falls prey to the repetitiveness. Moreover, what was the fuss with all those plastic emotions injected in between? Did they even mean to induce a tear in the audience’s eyes? Well, if they did, then the team of SOTY failed and that too in a gigantic proportions!


All hail the splendid cast and the gifted director, Karan Johar for making Student of the Year entertaining, pop and pulpy to the hilt. It is the same old wine but served in a new bottle and that too, KJO style!

Rating: ***

Image Courtesy: www.glamsham.com

(First published in www.udaipurtimes.com ; http://www.udaipurtimes.com/movie-review-student-of-the-year-same-old-wine-in-new-bottle/ )