That one leather jacket Ranbir Kapoor wears through half of New York looks heavy enough to cause scoliosis, which is if I'm honest about the only thing I could focus on during the opening twenty minutes of Siddharth Anand’s Anjaana Anjaani. It’s an overstuffed, aggressively styled product of its exact moment in Hindi cinema, falling somewhere between the slick, high-gloss urbanity Yash Raj tried to export to the West and the messy emotional wreckage of post-9/11 romantic dramas that desperately needed a good nap. You get bridges shot from angles that make Manhattan look like a tourist brochure designed by someone who has only ever seen America through old reruns of Friends, paired with characters who have decided that collective despair is basically just an aesthetic choice.

Akash and Kiara meet on a bridge because jumping off bridges is apparently too much of a hassle to do alone without witnesses who can ruin the punchline, and from there we plunge headfirst into a forty-eight-hour bucket list that hits every expected stop on the manic-pixie-meets-suicidal-investor circuit without ever earning the bruising, chaotic energy it keeps trying to fake. The script, credited to a few different people, treats clinical depression with the sort of breezy, pastel-filtered detachment usually reserved for bad holiday planning, which makes watching these two rich people tick off bucket list items in Vegas feel less like a psychological breakdown and more like a very expensive commercial for a credit card neither of them actually needs.

Still, Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra have that weird, magnetic sort of movie-star chemistry that almost saves the whole sinking enterprise from itself. Chopra is saddled with dialogue that sounds like it was scraped off the back of a motivational calendar found in a corporate breakroom, yet she manages to sell Kiara’s brittle, defensive perkiness with a flick of her eyes or a sudden drop in vocal cadence that tells you the character is one missed flight away from total collapse. Kapoor plays Akash with his usual bag of hyper-kinetic tics—the shoulder shrugs, the quick half-smiles, the restless pacing—and while it's basically the same guy he played in Wake Up Sid, just dipped in a gallon of expensive hair gel and dragged across the Atlantic, the charm still works when he drops the goofing off and just lets his face do the quiet work.

The secondary cast mostly stands around looking confused by the weather, though Zayed Khan pops up for a minute to remind everyone what a supporting role in an early-2010s Bollywood movie looks like when the actor didn't quite get the memo about the tone. Vishal-Shekhar’s soundtrack is loud, omnipresent, and desperately eager to tell you how you’re supposed to feel every single second, though the title track has a stubborn, earworm persistence that stays in your head long after you’ve left the theater. The cinematography by Ravi K. Chandran occasionally achieves moments of striking visual beauty, particularly when the camera just stops moving for three seconds and lets the actors inhabit a drab hotel room without throwing another neon light or lens flare at their faces.

It’s a movie obsessed with the idea of grand gestures, believing that personal trauma can be easily scrubbed away by driving fast cars through the desert or screaming at the ocean until your throat goes dry. The problem is that neither the director nor the writers seem interested in the actual mess of living, preferring instead to glide along the surface of things while looking for the next pretty sunset to frame behind their impossibly attractive leads. There's a specific kind of artificiality common in Hindi movies of this decade where every emotional scar looks like it was applied by a high-end makeup artist in a studio trailer, and this film wears that artifice like a badge of honor, daring you to care about people who refuse to drop their poses even when they are supposedly hitting rock bottom.

Zayed Khan's voice-dubbing in one particular confrontation scene sounds so disconnected from his physical body that I spent five full minutes wondering if another actor had wandered onto the soundstage with a cold, and that tiny mechanical failure bothered me more than the plot holes or the forced sentimentality. When you compare it to something like Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, which actually understood how to map out a messy, zigzagging emotional journey between two broken people without needing a neon Vegas backdrop or a bridge in Brooklyn, Anjaana Anjaani feels like an expensive cover band playing songs you already know a bit too well. It goes through all the right motions, hits every required emotional beat with the subtlety of a falling grand piano, and leaves you wondering why anyone thought giving two miserable millionaires a convertible and a camera crew was a substitute for a real story.