By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram) Scroll down for audio review

Jerry AKA Jaya Kumari, is an innocent looking girl from a lower middle-class family living in Punjab with her widowed mother and younger sister. When their mother is diagnosed with stage II cancer, Jerry takes up a job to transport drugs to make quick money.

Directed by Siddharth Sengupta, “Good Luck Jerry” stars Jahnvi Kapoor as the titular protagonist, and Mita Vashisht plays her mother. How Jerry stumbles into the world of cocaine makes for a rather amusing watch – an accidental encounter with a drug peddler on the run from the cops leads her at the door-step of Timmy (Jaswant Singh Dalal) a local supplier. Jerry charms Timmy into giving her a job and soon becomes not just the only woman in the gang, but also the most successful at hoodwinking cops. So things get dangerous when Jerry decides to call it quits.

This film is a reboot of Tamil movie “Kolamaavu Kokila”, so the decision to set the Bollywood adaptation in Punjab was a wise decision, since the state is known to have a drug problem. A problematic cop-thug nexus is depicted in the region, which enables drug peddlers to spread their tentacles with ease. All the actors do a pretty great job, the most fun was Deepak Dobriyal, who plays stalker/street romeo Rinku, madly and creepily in love with Jerry. In-fact, most of the male characters in the story are creepy in some or the other way. Unfortunately, despite a long-ish runtime, nobody gets enough space to grow on the viewer. And Jahnvi Kapoor’s Jerry is only sad or scared throughout the runtime, and even though the character does see a transformation, it just doesn’t shine the way it should, and it’s really the fault of the script-writers and director for not doing more with the protagonist’s characterization.

Viewers expecting some authentic Bihari twang from Jerry and family will be left disappointed, because all the Punjabi characters get the local accents bang-on, but the Biharis just sound out of place. However, I don’t really get the need of having a character sound from a certain place, especially if they aren’t even born and brought up in the region they are supposedly from. A few north-eastern characters get blink-and-miss appearances, which made it seem more like a half-heart attempt to show some representation, than an actual plot requirement.

There a few witty twists, but they involve minor characters and feel extremely underwhelming. You are made to wonder “why?! what’s the point?”, quite often in the second half. The pace gets slow, random shit starts to happen and viewers get a “Kaante” (the 2022 film) style climax. The ending is completely chaotic, and not in the ‘mad fun’ way. Since “Good Luck Jerry” is a reboot, the script-writers just had to tweak the script a little to make it more suitable for a north-Indian tale, and yet deliver an extremely poorly written ending, where Jerry is annoyingly “lucky”, so much so that it makes no sense. What starts off as a fun experience soon turns into regret.

It’s a 5/10 from me. You can stream the film on Disney Hotstar.