The Archies Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
How adorable everyone looks. The clothes, the dancing, the set design.
Is that enough though, to turn a comic panel into a screenplay?
In a time when waking up to your phone induces anxiety each morning, “The Archies” promised much-needed respite. Conveniently streaming on Netflix, requiring only the effort to make coffee. Sit back, relax, leave the work to Zoya Akhtar and let the whimsy take over.
The year is 1964, Archie Andrews is heard giving some tourists a tour of their town Riverdale, more specifically its Green Park. While this is an exposition right up top, the cute collage-style animation covers up the simplicity. He ends his tour by telling the visitors about a local band called the Archies that one day will be as big as the Beatles. Makes sense, this is a musical, canonically all the comic characters WERE in a band.
Except the band appears probably twice after this.
Meanwhile, wealthy industrialist Hiram Lodge returns to Riverdale, bringing his daughter Veronica back to join her old school friends, Archie, Betty, Jughead, Regie, Dilton, and Ethel. Moose and Midge are allowed to hang with the cool kids occasionally.
All the names are the exact same as the comics because these are Anglo-Indian families we are told, varying levels of descendants of British families that stayed back post-independence. As such, writers Reema Kagti, Zoya herself, and Ayesha Devitre Dhillon successfully Indianise these originally very American characters, giving them a reason to exist in this make-believe Indian hill station.
What the writing doesn’t do, however, is provide a fresh take on this tale as old as time. Veronica, played by Suhana Khan, is the rich London return Tina from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai type. But has little to offer as a character beyond momentary solidarity towards her less fortunate friends. Khushi Kapoor is Betty Cooper, a bibliophile. Or is she a home baker? HER father runs the local bookstore, but because you don’t quite know what that relationship is like, it’s difficult to care for her outrage when he loses said bookstore. Archie, played by Agstya, is written with even broader strokes. He likes both Betty and Ronnie and would like to go to London. Ethel is a hairdresser, Dilton is an inventor, Reggie flirts, and Jughead eats.
Lack of depth in character development greatly handicaps all the new, inexperienced actors on screen. Except for a very good Mihir Ahuja, who you might remember from Made in Heaven as Bulbul ji’s badtameez son, the rest of the cast is on their first acting job. Being presented in a Zoya Akhtar directorial would be a dream come true for any new actor. Alas, not all of them manage to take full advantage of the opportunity. Khushi Kapoor and Suhana Khan’s performances are strangely identical as distinct as they might look in appearance. There is a certain laziness that seeps into a person’s demeanor when they grow up rich. A specific kind of vocal fry, a languidness of being. They have no rush to get anywhere or to finish sentences, the world waits for them and trots at their pace. While Suhana does embody these traits, her performance as Veronica is almost lethargic. And somehow, Khushi Kapoor as Betty, who isn’t supposed to be rich, is also too unhurried and laidback. The two young actors look very fetching when performing the choreographed dance moves dressed in the cutest era-appropriate outfits. But the acting still has a very long way to go.
The support cast fares comparatively better. It is way more entertaining to watch Mihir as Jughead and Yuvraj as Dilton talk about their love for milkshakes and science than it is to invest in Agastya Nanda as Archie, the 17-year-old who is supposed to be our entry point into the story, but mostly just coasts along using the kind of unfair superpower only good looking people possess. The halo effect might make you believe Archie deserves to be the protagonist in this story. But if the bells and whistles were to disappear, the unpreparedness would certainly show.
Reggie also gets to contribute to the larger story arc by writing an article in a publication, but poor Ethel receives one inconsequential sub-plot about a job she must choose between two competing hair salons. If there is commentary here about India’s changing stance on capitalism, it unfortunately is buried deep.
The Archies isn’t ALL show and no substance. The usually bitchy-ness one expects to be the flavor of a high school story, is replaced by kindness and acceptance. A sweet moment between Dilton and Reggie made my cold heart happy. There is a rather random but enjoyable little bop about how everything is political, right from the lunch we eat to the way we dress for school. In a lesser film, this would have been a dance-off between 2 women fighting over the attention of a boy. Here it is a sing-along goading its young viewers into political action, the sequence setting the stage for a later sequence with a group of kids standing up against town management to protect trees in the city park. The writer ALSO wants to talk about what it means to be “Indian”, why minorities deserve to live where they choose to, and in portions, these attempts at civic statements come through. There is also a slightly underlined, but memorable scene where Reggie’s publisher father, played by Luke Kenny, tells Reggie about the importance of a free press, and what it is like to be a journalist operating under the government’s eye. If the internet has shown us anything recently, is that Genz is today very much interested in talking about all the above. Even if Agastya looks only mildly amused amidst it all.
The dialogue though doesn’t quite support the film’s intentions, big and small. At one point Koel Puri, playing Betty’s mother says to her, “The tingling feeling you get when you get when you like someone? That’s common sense leaving your body”, which is a straight-up meme floating on the internet for at least a decade. Another time Ronnie says to Betty, “You know what’s the best thing about cake? Yeh kabhi bhi khaya jaa sakta hai,”. This and other such confusingly glib dialogue makes The Archies the movie even harder to dote upon. This is simply put a pity because if there is ONE thing the film succeeds in being, it is cute. Every frame looks like its jumped straight out of an Archie comic, you can almost see the speech bubbles above the characters’ heads. Nikos Andritsakis’s camera brings the cool evenings and crisp chilly of this little hill town into your living room. This could be Mussoorie, Dalhousie, or Shimla, visually the film feels like walking through a childhood memory tbh.
Unfortunately, despite the overall playfulness and beautiful pastels, the film leaves you with an overwhelming sense of… a whole lot of nothing.
There are 2 parallel conflicts in the narrative we are shown. A love triangle between Archie, Ronnie, and Betty. The other is industrial capitalism. The battle against the industrialist who wants to level the park to make a hotel still has some escalation, ascension, and movement. However, the sudden rush with which BOTH conflicts were resolved gave me whiplash. The conclusions presented are so simple and rapid, that it left me wondering if there IS no other way to rehash this story. And if Riverdale, did the only thing that could have been done and turned the story into a bizarre sleepy small-town murder mystery, which I am to understand later even became supernatural?
You watch and tell me, the movie is now streaming happily on Netflix.
