Bill Gates, his head bobbing up and down like one of those plastic dolls you spy on taxi dashboards and with a smile plastered permanently on his face, lands in Simraon, a fictitious village in the Bihar heartland, and makes his way to an all-boys school that needs his funding to facilitate the education of girls. Except that this isn’t really Bill Gates. Before you can say ‘Microsoft’, you realise that it’s Gates’s face superimposed on the body of an actor, in what is probably the most WTF! moment in Bollywood history since Bertrand Russell shared screen space with Rajendra Kumar in the 1967 film Aman. And to think that was Russell for real, while this is just low-grade Photoshop.

Many more ‘Did that really happen?’ moments pepper Half Girlfriend, a bad film adapted from a bad book — Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend, a tepid and often infuriating read, the 285 pages of which work best in lulling you to sleep. The 136 minutes of Half Girlfriend the film, on the other hand, will make you want to dash towards the nearest exit.

Staying more or less faithful to Bhagat’s bestseller, Half Girlfriend opens with Bihari boy Madhav Jha (Arjun Kapoor) spotting Delhi girl Riya Somani (Shraddha Kapoor) playing basketball on campus — and falling for her at first sight. But unlike the novel that had Madhav battling to keep his raging hormones in check every time he spotted Riya, director Mohit Suri paints the rustic and rugged boy, who struggles with his English, as an innocent young chap, the kind who will steal glances from afar and sit still with pursed lips when the girl initiates a kiss. 

Despite their chalk-and-cheese backgrounds, Madhav and Riya get along like a house on fire, laughing over PJs and crying through movies, but a “super messed-up family” makes the poor little rich girl fight shy of commitment. “I am your half girlfriend,” she tells him with a smile, and Madhav is content to play along until he loses it one day and tells her: “Rehna hai toh reh, nahin toh kat le”. In the book, of course, it was the more crass “Dena hai toh de, nahin toh kat le”. 

Yes, the film sheds a lot of the flab that the novel had — misogyny to mundane backstories — but Half Girlfriend the film still ends up being an overbloated bore, its narrative moving from Delhi to Patna to New York, but its story really not going anywhere. 

Tushar Hiranandani’s screenplay strips the film so bare that there’s no real reason or conflict to justify why the characters do what they do — Riya opting for marriage on the rebound for a relationship that isn’t even one, Madhav landing up in New York looking for Riya in the millions of live music bars because she wanted to be a singer at age 12, she faking an illness to get rid of him and promptly falling into his arms a few scenes later… the list just goes on and on. If you’ve read Bhagat’s book, then these are not spoilers; if you haven’t, you now know why you shouldn’t watch the film. 

If it doesn’t mind-numb you, Half Girlfriend will make you shake your head — stalking is glorified, friendzone is given a half-baked definition and the boy is just not willing to accept that the girl may not be genuinely interested in him. But then this is the kind of girl who, when stressed, escapes security guards to stretch her legs atop India Gate and get some fresh air. Yes, this is that kind of film. 

To be fair, Half Girlfriend shouldn’t have ever been made into a film. Bhagat, who writes books just so that they become films one day, never gave Half Girlfriend the core or conflict that his other novels — Five Point Someone (3 Idiots) to The 3 Mistakes of my Life (Kai Po Che!) to 2 States — had. So you never feel for the characters or their problems — Madhav pining for Riya or she leading him on a wild goose chase around the world. Even when she drops the C-word (what’s with friendzone and cancer, remember Ae Dil Hai Mushkil?), you couldn’t care less.

Many a below-average romance has been rescued by its sparkling leads, but no such luck here. Lumbering and droopy-eyed, Arjun Kapoor is convincing neither as a college kid nor as a basketball champ, his poor attempt at a Bihari accent grating on both ears and nerves. Not all the plastic in the world can hold a candle to Shraddha Kapoor’s acting, or the lack of it here. Every time the two struggle with a dialogue or expression, a song comes to their rescue — at last count, there were 11! 

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to rescue us from Half Girlfriend.