Riverdale Has Signed Off, but Archie Is Back in the Cross-Cultural Musical The Archies

The Hindi-language production The Archies stretches its adaptation of the famous Archie Comics characters to Bollywood length without adding on a whole lot of incident, which seems appropriate to the source material. After all, Archie and the gang of mostly-wholesome Riverdale teenagers have been published, republished, digested and predigested for decades, with some recent variations but a whole lot of perma-teen shenanigans making up the backbone of the Archie-ves. The recently concluded network drama series Riverdale opted to compensate for the characters’ iconic/static nature with hairpin and/or nonsensical twists and turns through a darker and occasionally fantastical Archie-verse; The Archies starts from a similar place (the arrival of Veronica Lodge and turning Archie’s music career from a hobby into a passion) and takes it slower. Somehow, it winds up feeling both more faithful to the comics and, in its earnest period-piece way, more modern than Riverdale.

Or maybe it’s just that it labors less to mix and match its cultural influences. As Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda) explains in his capacity as part-time tour guide, this version of Riverdale is a small town in India with Anglo-Indian roots, supposedly creating an enclave of hybridized British and Indian culture still going strong in the film’s 1964 setting. Really, though, this Riverdale is half Indian, half classic Archie Americana, complete with Pop’s diner, bands playing at the old gazebo, imported mod hairstyles, and not a British accent to be heard. London, whence Veronica Lodge (Suhana Khan) arrives and Archie longs to attend music school, is more of a big-city abstraction than a direct influence (though Archie does name-drop the Beatles, however briefly). It’s hard to tell whether the slightly faded, pastel-leaning color scheme is meant to evoke faded comics pages, or is the just modern washing out that gives so many movies a sheen of digital whiteness.

Veronica’s return upends the teenage friend group’s lives, though not exactly in the way gal-next-door Betty (Khushi Kapoor) fears (but also somewhat in that way). Betty and Veronica, here more besties than frenemies, are both courted by Archie, though for the proto-free-love rock singer they’re more additions to the rotation than new points in a love triangle. Archie doesn’t try to break hearts – or even add notches to his bedpost. His relationships are PG-rated, but numerous. Combine this with his wistful songwriting, and the movie practically becomes God Help the Fuckboy.

The Archies doesn’t hit the heights of that little-seen Stuart Murdoch musical, in part because after a while, the movie loses sight of Archie’s potential music career in favor of another disruption via the ultra-rich Lodge family. Veronica’s father has big real estate plans for Riverdale that threaten some parts of the town that the gang holds dearest, and so this becomes more the kind of musical where a plucky group of underestimated young people must pull together and stand up for what they believe in.

This sort of plot was fairly musty back in 1964, and could easily push its luck at an era-appropriate 87 minutes. So it’s really quite remarkable, the degree to which The Archies freshens it up – arranging a whole musical number around the sharper, savvier members of Archie’s class instructing the feckless hero how (and I quote) “everything is political.” Maybe it’s a glib notion, but director Zoya Akhtar shoots all of the musical sequences with such verve that the movie becomes deeply and consistently charming just about any time the cast breaks into frequent song. There’s a duet that I’d characterize as a reverse “Summer Nights”; a Chicago-ish number on roller skates that seems to occur in the fevered and terrified imagination of Jughead (Mihir Ahuja); and an old-fashioned rock-and-roll number that Archie shrewdly/stupidly uses to try courting two girl sat once. Akhtar pushes through these whirlwinds of motion with grace and cuts for rhythm and momentum, rather than coverage. Anyone disillusioned with how poorly most of Hollywood’s go-to musical directors actually shoot their song-and-dance sequences should check out The Archies to have their spirits lifted (and possibly crash-land back down again upon realization that it’s better-shot than most of its big-budget American counterparts).

This musical dexterity actually undermines Archie a bit; it’s hard to be invested in his rock band when every teenager in the movie sings and dances with equal-or-better sparkle. This also leaves the movie a little dry in its final stretch, where musical numbers become less frequent, and the plot developments do start to feel more like marathoning a cluster of TV episodes. Following the characters throughout their final year of high school, with Archie in particular making preparations to move on, the movie develops a twinge of bittersweetness – only to eventually suppresses and swallow it in favor of a kind of benignly conservative version of teenage rebellion. Even as it endeavors to ultimately subvert a few Archie Comics tropes and deepen a few of its initial teen-movie stereotypes, The Archies feels reluctant to instigate lasting change in its characters, like a TV series preparing for a long run. Here’s the thing, though: I’d happily spend another two and a half hours with The Archies, so long as it kept the music going.

Director: Zoya Akhtar
Writer: Ayesha Devitre Dhillon, Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar
Starring: Agastya Nanda, Khushi Kapoor, Suhana Khan, Vedang Raina, Mihir Ahuja, Aditi Saigal, Yuvraj Menda
Release Date: December 7, 2023

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.