This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 21, 2014.
Good, Bad, and Ugly has a running time of about an hour and forty-five minutes. I think it’s important for me to mention that, because it took me about an hour of that (a spot well past the interval break) to figure out why it didn’t work.
Because it takes about that long for any of the characters at all to have much in the way of motivation. Up until that point, they are just a bunch of characters, most of whom I don’t like, and don’t really carry about. There isn’t anything about the film that comes together as a cohesive story.
Essentially, the plot, such as it is, is this: on a hartal day, a bunch of guys get a lift in a car driven by Suraj Venjaramoodu. It’s unclear to me why it’s important that it’s a hartal day, except that, perhaps, it’s the only way to justify Suraj Venjaramoodu’s character giving them all a lift.
There’s also a young woman who has a sister who needs an operation, but they don’t have the money for it. She’s (the young woman, not the sister) in love with one of the guys in the car, but he can’t round up the money to help, so she agrees to marry someone else who will provide the money for the sister’s operation.
One of the guys (who is trying to get some money for something else, but I’m confused as to whether he’s the guy that ran into trouble with the health deparment over selling bad shwarma to a customer, or if that’s the *other* other guy) steals a phone from the glovebox of the car driven by Suraj Venjaramoodu. On it is something that makes a big businessman nervous, enough that he pays up some blackmail money.
In the meantime, the guy who couldn’t help out his girlfriend gets a job with the businessman’s company, and he’s asked to take care of the blackmailer. Nudge nudge, wink wink, here’s your gun.
And the whole time I was watching this, I was getting more and more irritated that I couldn’t remember any of the character’s names, or what they did, but essentially, the film doesn’t make it easy. It’s a series of scenes and events stitched together, but in no way do they make a cohesive whole. By the time that you can figure out what’s going on, how everyone is connected, the film is all but over. And at that point, there’s an awful, awful rape scene. And right on the heels of that, an item number in a club. Up until then, I was trying to piece everything together. After that, I no longer cared.
I’m not going to make the obvious joke using the film’s title. I’m not going to say, “I watched this so you don’t have to.” But I did. So you don’t.