Writing this on a rained in Bangalore evening from my cousin’s desk as we settle in on a night of mid-week movie bingeing. We’ve been spending the last ten days wrapping up one movie or the other at the end of our work days. After watching a clutch that we’d never seen before, for this evening we decided on a Kunal Kemmu double bill: Go Goa Gone; Madagaon Express. Both films are upgrades of the existing friendship roadtrip Hindi movies like Dil Chahta Hai and ZNMD, the needless philosophising replaced by crackling one-upmanship between the friends making the sunny-sweet films critical darlings.

Go Goa Gone plays in the background as I type this on my laptop. The three friends zipping along in a red Volkswagen Polo to Goa to get away from breakups, job crunches and general sense of restlessness in their big city kind lives. It is about two twenty-somethings smart losers, and their earnest friend. Hardik and Luv force themselves on their Bunny’s forced office trip to Goa. There they decide to visit a remote, unknown island for a rave party, just before Bunny’s important office meeting. Luv and Hardik just want to score, drink and have a relaxing time during the trip. Hardik says, “Mera toh janam hi iss sab ke liye hua tha (I was born for all this).”

The 128-minute caper falls clearly in the category of horror-comedies. One of the first good ones to come out of the otherwise mostly dead in an unfunny way Hindi filmscape.