Salman Khan wears a cowboy hat in the desert and honestly it just looks like something he brought from home. That is where we are, three and a half hours into Nikhil Advani’s sprawling, structurally exhausting experiment in multi-strand romance, wondering if anyone on set had a mirror. Bollywood movies have historically loved the sprawling ensemble format, dragging half the industry onto a soundstage and crossing their fingers that the emotional math works out in the end, but Salaam-E-Ishq takes this particular gamble and stretches it until the rubber band snaps right in your face. It is a remake of Love Actually in the loosest possible sense, retaining the structural skeleton of interconnected London and New York vignettes while transplanting the emotional weight into the glossy, over-lit dreamscape of modern Hindi cinema where every kitchen looks like a showroom and every heartbreak comes with a backing choir.

Advani directs with the frantic energy of a man who has six screens open at once and refuses to mute any of them. The screenplay, credited to multiple writers, lurches between tones so abruptly that you get narrative whiplash before the intermission pops up on screen. One minute we are watching Anil Kapoor play a desperate, aging husband trying to manufacture a midlife crisis in a plush hotel, and the next we are trapped in a harrowing, sweat-drenched sequence with John Abraham and Shannon Esra that feels like it wandered in from a completely different genre of cinema altogether. The pacing is a genuine problem, and if I'm honest, the editor should have been given a pair of scissors and a long holiday. Scenes are allowed to drag on for whole minutes past their narrative expiration date simply because someone spent money on the crane shot and they wanted to get their rupee's worth out of the rental.

The performances exist in six different states of reality simultaneously. Priyanka Chopra is working at a pitch of manic, fame-obsessed desperation that feels entirely divorced from the breezy rom-com energy Akshaye Khanna brings to their shared segments, creating a weird friction where you can almost see the actors looking at each other wondering what movie they signed up for. Govinda and Shannon Esra, playing a desi taxi driver and an American tourist, lean so hard into broad farce that their scenes belong in a cartoon, yet somehow they emerge with more dignity than Juhi Chawla and Anil Kapoor, who are saddled with dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a self-help manual by way of a Hallmark greeting card. It is a cast too large for its own good, crowded with famous faces who wander in for fifteen minutes to collect a paycheck and look slightly confused by the costume design.

Let’s talk about the sound design for a second, because the background score by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy refuses to let you have a single quiet thought from the opening frame to the closing credits. Every time a character blinks, strings swell to tell you how sad they are, and if someone drops a glass of water, the brass section makes sure you understand the symbolic weight of the shatter. It is a loud film, aggressively so, drowning out the occasional moments of genuine human observation with wall-to-wall orchestrations that exhaust the ear long before the three-hour mark rolls past. Cinematographer G. Bobby puts a golden, Vaseline-smeared filter over everything that makes even a rainy London street look like a commercial for high-end floor tiles. The visuals are slick and expensive and completely devoid of texture, smoothing away all the dirt and grit that might have made these characters resemble actual living people instead of models posing next to vintage cars.

There is a specific thematic obsession running through all these tangled plots with marriage and commitment that feels very anxious about the state of modern relationships in contemporary urban environments. The film wants to tell us that love survives distance, temptation, and bureaucratic incompetence, hammering this point home through six different iterations until you are numb to the very concept of romance. It lacks the quiet, devastating observational sharpness of Mani Ratnam's Yuva, choosing instead to rely on broad emotional strokes and swelling choruses to do the heavy lifting that character development should be handling. Characters learn their lessons not through internal growth or painful realizations, but through grand public spectacles that involve running through airports or stopping traffic in the middle of busy intersections.

Ayesha Takia and Sohail Khan get stuck in a subplot involving a runaway bride and a nervous groom that plays out like a rejected sitcom pilot from the mid-nineties, complete with broad reaction shots that linger a beat too long on the actors' faces after the punchline has already evaporated into the air. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened, this weird insistence on holding a two-shot of someone looking shocked until the silence becomes uncomfortable. By the time Vidya Balan and John Abraham are dealing with their post-accident trauma in a hospital room that looks suspiciously like an interior design magazine layout, you stop caring about who ends up with whom. The film simply collapses under the sheer weight of its own ambition, leaving behind a trail of glossy images, deafening musical cues, and a very tired Salman Khan still wearing that unfortunate hat.