Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ginny Weds Sunny’ on Netflix, a Bollywood Rom-Com That Begs Us to Laugh (and Fails)

New on Netflix is Ginny Weds Sunny, a Bollywood rom-com that spends the entirety of its two-hour run time putting the title into question. But why would it be named such if such didn’t happen? Thankfully, we’re here to let you know if the movie fulfills the promise of its title, although it’s ultimately moot. Either way, it probably needs a new title — and possibly a new screenplay.

GINNY WEDS SUNNY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sunny (Vikrant Massey) is an extraordinary cook. He cooks and cooks and cooks for his family. That’s his character trait. That, and he’s a bit goofy and lighthearted, with tall hair, and his father (Rajiv Gupta) owns a hardware store. Sunny would love to open a restaurant, but Pappi won’t help him with the startup cash until he gets married. Romance is dead. Pragmatism is not. He goes on a first date and, like a maniac, floats a marriage proposal out there like a newspaper sailboat into a cat-4 hurricane. She’s more of a get-to-know-you-for-a-year type — you know, a reasonable human being. Back to the drawing board for Sunny.

We meet Ginny (Yami Gautam) as her “renowned matchmaker” mother Shobha (Ayesha Raza) tries to arrange a marriage with a boastful ignoramus who can’t chew with his mouth closed. Ginny flees the interview, and her mother threatens suicide ha ha ha, because it’s so funny when people kill themselves! Ginny very stubbornly refuses to marry for any reason other than love. She’s also still friends with her ex, Nishant (Suhail Nayyar), and the situation is so confusing, she refers to him as Confusion — when he’s not around, of course. Sunny and Ginny are former schoolmates; he crushed on her, and she was out of his league, but now, they’re immaculately plucked and wardrobed adults, so they should be over that by now maybe? Anyway, they bump into each other at a wedding and, as these things go, they burst into an elaborate song-and-dance extravaganza with dozens of garishly clad dancers and elaborately layered and autotuned backing choruses swirling about them in an explosion of color, sound and movement.

Contrary to common sense, this doesn’t mean they’re in love, or even ready for a date, though. Ginny’s a tough nut to crack, so Sunny enlists her mother for assistance, and she’s game to help him stalk Ginny on the train and at work and on the street until she relents to his god damned intrusive charm, which is a very funny situation and not at all creepy! His relentlessly engineered meet-cutes eventually result in a moment where they eat at her favorite place and cut the crap and talk like real people talk, or as close to real people as this movie gets, anyway. But the Sunny-Shobha conspiracy hovers over this plot like a shroud, and when the lid gets ripped off this kind of thing, well, that’s when movies get interesting, theoretically. Will Ginny and Sunny do as the title says, or will it defy its own assertions?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Reach into the movie grab-bag of miscommunication plots full of impossibly stubborn characters, and whatever title you pull is inevitably better than Ginny Weds Sunny.

Performance Worth Watching: Gautam is the best at holding her own against the gale-force stupidity of this material.

Memorable Dialogue: Ginny chastises her mother for trying to hook her up with a guy who chews like a homunculus: “You bring a cow pie and I’m to eat it like cake?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Ginny Weds Sunny looks great, but has all the depth of a flea’s fedora. It manages a stunning feat, stretching about 30 minutes of material into two hours. The characters are empty vessels whose non-contents have been dumped into a void. The film stretches the Sunny-Ginny-Nashrat love triangle until it’s threadbare. The prodigious musical sequences exist to jolt us from our slumber, and the sad montages put us back under; none of them are at all necessary to the plot, which all too quickly becomes repetitive and stagnant, and offers only the slightest lick of a whiff of a fart of a dramatic conundrum.

Director Puneet Khanna tries to goose the material in all sorts of desperate ways: Extravagant wardrobes, lush photography and hair, hair, hair. One-liners are punctuated with little cutesy cues and sound effects informing us when we should laugh, although the film wouldn’t need such things if it was actually funny. Believe it or not, this is all relatively tolerable until the third act manifests as a dread monolith to tonal incongruity in which the lightness of earlier scenes is replaced with a somber march toward the unstoppable inevitabilities of the break-up-and-make-up plot. It becomes a grueling soap opera for whoever has made it this far. Of course, it involves Sunny’s arranged marriage to a gang boss’ daughter, so some of the malignant story contortions occur under the threat of death by machine gun. Hilarious. This movie is phony as a flea market Coach purse, and holds together almost as well.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Ginny Weds Sunny is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad movie.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Ginny Weds Sunny on Netflix