Brahman Naman Netflix Movie Review

Brahman Naman (2016)
Watch Brahman Naman on Netflix
Written by: Naman Ramachandran
Directed by: Qaushiq Mukherjee
Starring: Shashank Arora , Tanmay Dhanania , Chaitanya Varad
Rated: TV-MA/R

Brahman Naman -If sex crazed teens made a movie.

Plot:
In this Netflix original teen sex comedy, a college quiz team from India attempts to win a quiz bowl and lose their virginity.

Verdict:
This movie is less than subtle about the premise. It's Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and American Pie (1999) set in India with a refrigerator masturbation incident and animated genitalia portrayed in just the first few minutes. The dialog is clever, but completely disjointed with the premise and content. There is a good idea hidden somewhere deep in this movie.
Skip it.

Review:
If you're a fan of American Pie, this is a spiritual successor. I don't like the former or the latter.

Naman and his college buddies are smart and the dialog is sharp, but it's too well written and sounds hollow. The writers feel like they're showing off their pop-culture knowledge and wordplay skills instead of writing natural dialog that flows between characters. That and it's just too high-brow for what this movie is, a crude juvenile fantasy.

Surprisingly, it's not a parody though it often comes dangerously close to being just that. It would be a slight improvement.  I don't know why this movie exists. The point of view of the characters is banal. This feels like a movie made by outcast teens imagining their college sex lives. This movie is never more than the first twenty minutes, a raunchy pseudo-comedy.

Naman is an insecure nerd whose fantasies trump reality. He's arrogant with his outcast friends, often putting them down. He thinks he's too good to be unpopular, but the world disagrees. Naman becomes infatuated with only the prettiest girls, while treating a girl that desperately likes him for no explicable reason terribly. The characters that play his friends are little more than cardboard cutouts just to give the appearance of depth and provide figurative punching bags for Naman's antics.