Juhi Chawla wears a hat in the second half of Ishq that looks less like a costume piece and more like an emergency measure to keep pigeons from nesting on her head, and if I am honest, that millinery choice distracted me through a crucial confrontation about class and wealth. Hindi movies of the late nineties operated on a logic of hyper-saturated melodrama where subtlety was treated like a communicable disease, which is perhaps why Indra Kumar’s direction feels less like storytelling and more like being yelled at by an enthusiastic uncle at a wedding. There is no middle gear in a film like this, just a frantic idle that shakes the dashboard until your teeth ache. The screenplay by Tanvir Khan and Ishraque Ahmed takes two standard-issue romantic tracks and smashes them together with the subtlety of a falling safe, dividing the world cleanly into scheming millionaires and salt-of-the-earth mechanics who communicate exclusively through virtuous close-ups.

Ajay Devgn spends most of the runtime looking like he has just been informed his car has been towed, which turns out to be precisely the right energy for a rich kid whose conscience is suddenly interfering with his inheritance. Aamir Khan plays the opposite pole with a manic grin that threatens to unhinge his jaw, bouncing around the frame like a pinball fired by pure mischievousness before the second-act tragedy drags him down into the mud of pure, unadulterated suffering. They have a chemistry that works precisely because they are entirely different acting organisms, Devgn all heavy-lidded stillness and Khan all elbows and rapid-fire dialogue delivery. Yet the supporting players are often left to twist in the wind by a camera that refuses to let anyone breathe for more than two seconds without cutting to a reaction shot that lingers just a fraction of a beat too long, as if afraid the audience might have missed the emotion. I found myself staring at Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s wig in scene after scene, wondering if it was rented or owned, because the movie gave my brain so little actual narrative friction to chew on.

There is an awkward stiffness to the way Anu Malik’s soundtrack bursts into the room without knocking, forcing characters to start sprinting through gardens in Switzerland before you have even processed that they changed jackets. The choreography has that specific late-century Bollywood desperation where thirty dancers in identical silver vests appear behind the lead actors out of thin air, though Chawla manages to anchor the musical numbers with a kind of kinetic joy that survives even the most punishingly bright lighting. Cinematographer Baba Azmi points the lens straight at the actors’ foreheads and leaves it there, capturing every bead of sweat during the emotional confrontations with a flat, television-movie brightness that makes the high-end sports cars look like plastic toys from a department store. It reminds me of Raja Hindustani in its complete lack of visual texture, substituting saturated primary colors for actual atmosphere every single time the budget allowed for another crane shot.

Class warfare in this universe is reduced to cartoon villainy, with Dalip Tahil and Mohan Joshi barking orders from leather armchairs while wearing silk robes that practically scream tax evasion. The rich are uniformly terrible human beings who spend their afternoons plotting how to ruin the lives of poor mechanics, and the poor are so relentlessly noble it makes you want to donate a sack of cynical realism to the local village council. That rigid binary drains the stakes from the central romance, because you never doubt for a second that love will conquer all if only the background score can get loud enough to drown out the plot holes. When Madhu and Ajay finally face off against their respective patriarchs, the dialogue sounds like it was translated from a pamphlet on labor rights distributed outside a textile mill in 1974.

What keeps the whole enterprise from sliding entirely into self-parody is the sheer, undeniable wattage of its stars, who sell this ridiculous material with a straight-faced commitment that borders on heroic. When Khan has to weep over a hospital bed, he doesn't hold back, crying actual snot-bubble tears that make you forgive the three terrible comedy sketches involving Johnny Lever that preceded the scene. It is a messy, loud, exhausting piece of commercial filmmaking that refuses to let the viewer sit in silence for even a moment, punctuating every minor plot development with a thunderous percussion hit on the soundtrack. You leave the theater with a slight headache and the distinct feeling you have just been through a very loud car wash, but at least the brushes were clean.