Bow Bow Movie Review: A dog without a purpose

Imagine babysitting an annoying five-year-old at a wedding reception on compulsion, with the DJ playing a never-ending bad song. Debutant Pradeep Killikar's Bow Bow feels somehow worse.

Ahaan is a primary school kid, living with his grandparents. His schoolmates see him as a harbinger of bad luck as his parents passed away soon after his birth. He is a loner who scribbles, "I don't have friends. I'm being bullied!", on the walls of his room. One day, he decides to get a dog. You would think it is for companionship. But our kid seems to have been wrongly influenced by Prabhu Solomon's Kumki. He buys a labrador only to seek revenge on the stray dog that chases him on his way to school. By this time, I had several questions. Why aren't the adults paying attention to this kid's condition? Why is he allowed to walk such a long distance alone? Why isn't the kid doing anything closely related to his age?

Director: Pradeep Killikar
Cast: Ahaan, Siva, Tejaswy

Things get worse when the kid decides to train his pet Scoobie for the final faceoff with the stray dog. All of a sudden, he starts behaving like a darker version of Irudhi Suttru Madhavan and yells at it even for the simplest of all reasons. He is almost using Scoobie as a plus-sized stress ball. Montages of him with Scoobie that are supposed to establish their relationship, seem like an amateurish take on the Hutch ad.

The dog seems to perform considerably better than most of the other actors, especially towards the end of the film. But for a major portion of Bow Bow, this dog is just a prop, with songs and the background score somehow making things worse. Composer Denis Vallaban keeps using 'Bow Bow' as the background score, and Marc D Muse's songs, including a rehash of Gangnam style, is simply painful.

Dog films have the power to make even the stone-hearted turn into bawling babies. They take you on an emotional journey and leave you with a heavy heart or a content smile. Bow Bow leaves you with a migraine.