Wake Up Sid is a fresh slice-of-life movie which leaves you smiling by the time you are leaving the movie hall.
The movie is about Sid(Ranbir Kapoor), a spoilt brat who is casual, careless, reckless and directionless, thanks to his well-off father and the privileges that come his way. The character reminds you of Hrithik Roshan in Lakshya and Aamir Khan in Dil Chahta Hai.
Sid meets Aisha(Konkona Sen Sharma) at his college farewell party. Aisha is a Calcutta girl who has come to Bombay in her desire to be independent and to pursue her dreams of being a successful writer. The two are very unlike each other, their age difference being the least of their dissimilarities. And yet, their chemistry is so obvious to us.
Sid flunks his exams, gets nasty with his mother and is thrown out by his firm father. Now he has no home, no cash and no credit card. He moves into Aisha’s humble home, and the rest of the movie is of Sid’s metamorphosis from a boy to a man and the blossoming / realising of love between the unlikely duo.
The plot may sound familiar, but the movie has excellent direction by first time director Ayan Mukherjee. Actors Ranbir Kapoor and Konkona Sen Sharma have both done sufficient justice to their respective characters in the movie - Ranbir as the kid who struggles to mature, and Konkona as the middle class Kolkata girl who struggles to find her place in the big city called Bombay. The movie does seem to drag in the second half, but it is perhaps to give sufficient time for the two leads to discover themselves and each other. The movie has a fresh slice-of-life feel to it, and with the actors’ expressions, you can almost always sense what they are thinking(Ranbir thinking of his mum when he is taking snaps of his neighbouring kid and the kid’s mother; Konkona gradually developing an attraction towards Ranbir and many such scenes).
There are a few blemishes though. The other characters in the movie are not fully developed – Aisha’s boss(played by Rahul Khanna) and Sid’s colleague and friend Tanya – their characters are almost single dimensional. Sid doesn’t seem to be sharing sufficient chemistry with his college buddy Rishi(Namit Das). One wonders earlier on in the movie how Aisha can manage to move into a flat and do it up so trendily when she doesn’t even have a job in hand.
And yet, despite these few shortcomings, a predictable plot and its leisurely pace, WUS delights with its casual and fresh feel and excellent acting by its central characters, leaving us feeling good at the end of it.