Kolkatar Harry is a fantasy-drama film directed by Rajdeep Ghosh and starring Soham Chakraborty, Priyanka Sarkar, Laboni Sarkar, Arindam Ganguly, Dipankar Dey, Prosenjit Chatterjee and Oishika Guhathakurta in the lead roles. The movie has a runtime of 124 minutes.
Zee5 describes the movie as:
Harinath, a carpool driver and Harry Potter fan, loves storytelling and performing magic tricks. Will true magic make its way into Hari’s life and solve his problems when he loses his job?
– Kolkatar Harry Review Does Not Contain Spoilers –
Sometimes a movie reaches such a weird limit in your life that you don’t know what you feel about it. Do you just stop watching within the first 5 minutes or wait for 2 hours and hope to whatever is holy that it picks up in some way?
The movie clearly is a Harry Potter movie but a Bengali version of it, so much so that it’s embarrassing to watch it. But the worst part of Kolkatar Harry is the atrocious CGI that I don’t understand the point of nor the necessity of. At every nook and cranny, there’s something created with CGI that is not only silly and hilarious but almost insulting to the audience.
I almost wish they never created this movie, if only so that we didn’t have to watch this abomination of CGI mess. The plot revolves around Hari, a school bus driver who is very affectionate with the kids whom he ferries to and from school.
I understand the emotion of this movie; I really do. But Kolkatar Harry is just so badly made that it’s a chore to sit through the entire runtime of the movie to get to its point. There are random scenes here and there that don’t really mesh together with each other all too well and the atrocious CGI makes the scenes stand out, and not in a good way.
Also, let me just mention here that Hari’s overt friendliness with the kids, especially with Titli, sends off red flags in our reality-stricken lives. Even though he doesn’t have malice in his heart, it’s difficult to take this seriously when what happens, in reality, is far more horrible than this movie would like us to believe. Let’s not even get into the abuse Titli faces at home that just never gets any sort of resolution.
None of the characters has any sort of character arc – even Hari is bland and boring. Mohor’s entire life setting is “stressed corporate worker”. Her parents just are there – her mother almost gets to do something else but is immediately brought back to make rotis the moment following her plot becomes too difficult. They never get out of these boxes and try to show something else that their lives might contain.
Moreover, Kolhatar Harry uses all of Harry Potter’s spells in a weird way that feels extremely cheap and suffocating to watch. It further throws very heavy plot points into the mix without much thought. There’s a moment where, burdened by everything that is happening in her life, Priyanka Sarkar’s character screams ‘wingardium leviosa’ in her office bathroom. You understand the emotion behind it but die of cringe anyway.
Kolkatar Harry loses itself to find some sort of a point – for a good chunk of the runtime, you stand there confused, wondering what is even going on in this movie and what it is trying to achieve. It’s probably about how stress changes and moulds our lives, but it does a horrible job at bringing that forward. The silly magic gimmicks, coupled with Hari’s stupid hand tattoo of Harry Potter’s scar are infuriating and mind-numbing.
For some reason, the movie decides to go on a very odd route which feels like an attempt at a cheap shock factor and is solved just so quickly. Before long, all is well, and everything is right – everyone just forgets the horrible thing Hari was accused of or that Titli was actually abused. But sure, simple solutions to one of the most horrible crimes make perfect sense. Why try to think too deeply when you can just breeze through it all?
There are other more profound movies that tackle the stress of school and work in our lives. This one doesn’t reach that level and, in turn, tries to keep things surface level for the most part. Also, that atrocious CGI is mind-numbingly horrible and takes you out of any and all interest that you might feel.
Summing Up: Kolkatar Harry
Kolkatar Harry is hotch-potch plot points that don’t really gel together. Things start, only for it to be left somewhere in the middle without much fanfare or consideration. There are better movies out there for you to watch; give this one a miss.
Kolkatar Harry is streaming on Zee5.
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This movie is not for wokes. It’s for people who still believe in simplicity, love, faith and other virtues which were supposed to be instilled, but unfortunately lack in most of the creatures moving around our society.
lol, I knew what the review would be the moment I saw a liberal, so-called independant mordernized Bengali woman writing. Enough said.
Exactly, something that people like this reviewer will never understand. No wonder Bengali movies hesitate to make good but simple movies that don’t cater to the woke ideology.