'The Archies' review: Bollywood take on the beloved American comic offers mixed pleasures

WHAT IT'S ABOUT "The Archies" finds the familiar characters and world of Archie Comics transplanted to 1960s India for a sprawling musical adaptation.

Archie (Agastya Nanda) and the gang are re-imagined as teens occupying an Anglo-Indian Riverdale that finds its small-town idyll disrupted when Veronica's developer dad Hiram (Alyy Khan) tries to build a hotel in the middle of a beloved park.

That plot gets entwined with the timeless love triangle, as both Ronnie (Suhana Khan) and Betty (Khushi Kapoor) receive Archie's affections.

The other iconic characters, from Jughead to Reggie, have big roles to play as well, in the movie in both Hindi and English from director Zoya Akhtar.

MY SAY This vision of the Archie Comics universe re-imagines it as a classical backlot musical, with bold colors and resplendent production design.

Everything pops in a way that suggests a great degree of care and attention have gone into every frame. It's all quite pretty: the costumes, the sweeping camerawork, the expertly choreographed dance-offs, the picturesque shops, the spotless town green.

It's a veritable case study in how to make a movie look pristine.

Fans of the comics and the worlds they have inspired will surely be swept away by the spectacle and not mind the fact that the movie has barely enough of a story for a 90-minute picture, let alone one that stretches to nearly two-and-a-half hours.

Beyond the unambiguously impressive service-level features, the compelling small-town '60s fantasy aesthetic, the movie offers little of interest for the rest of us.

The stakes are so low that "The Archies" shifts from fun to interminable and you look on in horror, realizing there's still half the movie left.

The save-the-park storyline is meant to be given more heft by connecting the space to the history of the Anglo-Indian community through a tree-planting tradition, but there's only the most halting inclination to reflect on what that really means.

There's the potential for something more in the blending of cultures at the heart of the picture, which begins with a brief history lesson about the Anglo-Indian community and pointedly sets itself less than 20 years after the end of the British colonial era. It gets at this in other ways, too, including its evoking of period American pop culture standards such as a large dance scene set to "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs.

But truly elevating "The Archies" to that more interesting place would have required a willingness to deviate from the source material. Its requirements leave little opportunity to see any of that through.

There has to be time for all the expected antics, including the aforementioned love triangle. That wouldn't be as much of a problem if there were any reason to care about these characters.

But these versions of Archie, Betty and Ronnie have little in the way of definable personality traits. So the shenanigans, and the girls' desire to teach Archie a lesson in response to his earnest philandering, play more like an obligation than a necessity.

BOTTOM LINE The movie looks great, it's conceptually interesting, and it has several memorable moments. But it's also interminable.