Pulkit Samrat wears a leather jacket in this movie that looks like it cost roughly eight hundred rupees at a roadside stall in Sarojini Nagar, and honestly, that detail tells you more about the production's actual budget than any trade report ever could. Sequel math is usually pretty simple in Bollywood, meaning you take the characters people liked, turn up the volume on their most annoying ticks, and drop them into a plot that involves a tiger, some fake honey, and a lot of running around South Delhi. If I'm honest, nobody was really demanding to know what happened to Hunny, Choocha, Zafar, and Lali after they got out of prison at the end of the first outing, but film producers have this weird habit of assuming affection is a permanent state rather than a fleeting emotion tied to specific circumstances. Mrigdeep Singh Lamba returns to the director's chair, bringing along the exact same visual palette of sun-bleached concrete and primary-colored shirts that made the original look like a detergent commercial shot on a slightly overcast Tuesday afternoon. The screenplay tries to capture that same chaotic lightning in a bottle, but it mostly just feels like watching someone try to restart a lawnmower that keeps sputtering out because the spark plug is fouled up with old grass clippings.

The narrative kicks off with Richa Chadha's Bholi Punjaban getting out of jail and immediately forcing the boys back into a sketchy scheme involving a lottery scam and a sketchy politician who has a pet tiger that looks terribly CGI-ed in every single wide shot. Ali Fazal barely registers this time around, wandering through the frames with a vaguely perplexed expression as if he just remembered he left his oven on back at his real apartment, while Manjot Singh does the heavy lifting by leaning entirely into his nervous stutter and wide-eyed panic. It is a small thing but it bugged me how often the sound mixing drops out completely during Manjot's dialogue scenes just so the audience can hear his breathing, which feels less like an artistic choice and more like someone forgot to monitor the boom mic properly during the Foley sessions. The pacing drags in the middle stretch where the boys have to hide out in a dilapidated warehouse that seems to exist outside the bounds of physical geography, featuring doors that lead to nowhere and windows that change position depending on which angle the camera is pointing.

There is an exhausting reliance on callback humor, trotting out catchphrases from the first film long after any comic momentum has completely evaporated from the room. Pulkit Samrat tries very hard to maintain that slick-talking confidence, yet he mostly comes across like a guy who practiced his swagger in front of a bathroom mirror for three hours straight and forgot to leave any room for actual spontaneity. The supporting players get very little to do except react with exaggerated double-takes, a facial expression that the editing department relies on so heavily you could practically set a metronome to the cutbacks. When you compare this sort of frantic gag-writing to something like Rajkumar Santoshi's Andaz Apna Apna, the structural laziness becomes painfully obvious, because older hindi films at least understood that jokes need a setup that takes more than three seconds of screen time to pay off properly. Instead, we get rapid-fire sequences of people shouting at each other in cramped hallways while the background score works overtime to convince you that something hilarious is happening.

Cinematographer Andre Menezes points his lens at Delhi monuments with the enthusiasm of a tired tourist taking smartphone photos for an Instagram grid, flattening all the texture out of the alleyways and street markets until everything resembles a corporate brochure for municipal development. The soundtrack features a couple of tracks that try to mimic the infectious energy of "Ambarsariya," but they mostly sound like cast-offs that were rejected from a second-rate romantic comedy starring Emraan Hashmi back in 2011. Characters wander in and out of scenes without any real motivation beyond the immediate demands of the plot machinations, creating a viewing experience that feels less like a narrative and more like a series of deleted sketches strung together with cheap transitions. You find yourself noticing things like the continuity errors in the background extras—the guy in the blue shirt buying vegetables who walks past the frame four times in the span of two minutes—because the foreground action is just too tedious to hold your attention for long stretches.

Hindi movies have a long history of struggling with second installments, largely because the writers mistake character growth for simply giving them louder clothes and more elaborate scams to botch. The central theme here seems to be loyalty among dimwits, though it gets buried under so many layers of frantic slapstick and forced local slang that you can barely discern any human emotion beneath the noise. Pankaj Tripathi shows up for a few scenes as the exasperated police officer, delivering his lines with a weary deadpan that suggests he read the script in the vanity van and realized he just needed to collect his paycheck and go home. That kind of professional exhaustion seeps into the performance style of nearly everyone involved, turning what should have been a breezy afternoon caper into a slog of missed punchlines and recycled premises. It is a movie that exists primarily because the first one made money, filling up multiplex screens during a slow December week when audiences will apparently watch three men chase a tiger around a wedding venue just to escape the winter chill outside.

The climax involves a complicated heist that relies entirely on characters being uniformly incompetent at precisely the right moments to keep the tension alive, which is a neat trick if you like your comedies completely devoid of stakes. As the credits start to roll over a blooper reel that features actors corpsing during serious dialogue exchanges—always a desperate move in modern bollywood movies—you are left wondering why everyone involved looked so tired even when they were supposed to be having the time of their lives on screen. There's no grand vision here, no subversive take on the hustle culture of North India, and honestly not even many laughs that stick in your head past the parking lot. It simply runs its course, hits every predictable beat with the subtlety of a falling anvil, and leaves you wishing you had stayed home to watch something from the late nineties instead.