Arjun Rampal looks deeply uncomfortable in every single frame of this movie, which is frankly the most relatable thing about the entire enterprise. You can spot the exact moment in the first twenty minutes where he seems to realize that his agent lied to him about the script revisions, yet he stays, pushing through the chaos with the glazed determination of a man who already spent his advance on a vacation home in Goa. Sajid Khan directs like someone who watched a lot of British farce on VHS during a long flight and decided that shouting was a reasonable substitute for timing. The screenplay lurches forward on the assumption that if characters scream their lines louder and run down hotel corridors faster, nobody will notice the plot holes you could drive an extra-long trailer through. It is all terribly loud.

Akshay Kumar plays Aarav, a man so intensely unlucky that his presence allegedly causes minor natural disasters, though mostly it just causes supporting actors to flail their arms. He commits to the physical comedy with the kind of terrifying energy that usually requires a heavy dose of pre-workout powder, dragging the scenes along by their ankles. Deepika Padukone wanders through the London sets looking like she just received some mildly distressing news about her luggage, remaining entirely gorgeous while everyone else is sweating profusely under the studio lights. The supporting cast features Riteish Deshmukh, who pulls off the heavy lifting of reacting to absurd premises with a weary exhaustion that feels closer to documentary footage than acting. Then there is Chunkey Pandey as Aakhri Pasta, a character who arrives with a recurring catchphrase that stops being funny roughly three seconds after it leaves his mouth for the very first time, yet persists until your ears start to ring. Boman Irani shows up to chew the scenery with such enthusiasm that you half expect him to swallow the furniture, barking orders in a manic register that recalls his work in Waqt: The Race Against Time but dialed up past the point of structural safety. Lara Dutta and Jiah Khan play the rotating female leads whose primary narrative function is to stand in doorways, look incredulous, and occasionally fall off balconies or out of windows for no discernible reason other than someone in the editing bay yelled cut.

The cinematography is drenched in that particular glossy teal-and-orange digital grade that makes every hotel suite look like an airport hotel lobby in Dubai, flattening whatever texture might have existed on location. The soundtrack drops hooks that recur with the persistence of a migraine, looping the same three bars of upbeat electronic percussion whenever someone opens a door or drops a tray of champagne glasses. It’s a small thing but it bugged me how the Foley artists decided that every time a character turns their head quickly, there has to be an exaggerated swish sound like a leather whip cutting through humid air, even when they are just sitting quietly on a beige sofa. The editing room must have been a crime scene of discarded reaction shots because the reaction shots that actually survived the final cut linger for about two seconds too long, trapping the actors in moments of silent gurning that go right past comedy into something mildly unsettling. Bollywood movies have certainly relied on mistaken identity and farcical door-slamming for decades, yet there is a distinct difference between the controlled chaos of something like Golmaal and this relentless barrage of noise. Nobody lets a joke breathe for even a fraction of a second, terrified that if the audience gets five seconds of quiet they might remember they paid money to watch a man dressed as a woman chase a monkey through a lobby.

Beneath the frantic plotting about insurance fraud and multi-layered marital deception, the movie operates on a deeply conservative panic about urban lifestyles and modern relationships. Every character is either lying about their marital status or trying to scam an inheritance out of a wealthy relative who lives in a sprawling mansion that appears to have been decorated by an algorithm. The men are all cowards who lie compulsively to avoid minor confrontations, while the women are either shrieking harpies or passive prizes to be won at the end of a long sequence involving falling wedding cakes and confused security guards. It paints a picture of modern wealth where nobody actually works for a living, instead spending their days lounging in enormous penthouses and plotting ways to deceive their fathers-in-law over breakfast. This is normal for commercial Hindi films of a certain era, sure, but here it feels less like escapism and more like a series of sketches shot in a closed environment where nobody is allowed to go outside.

The pacing slows down around the two-hour mark into a protracted sequence in a hospital that goes on for so long you can feel your hair growing grey in the dark of the theater, a masterclass in how to drain the energy out of a farce by explaining the jokes twice. Lilette Dubey appears briefly to deliver lines with the weary precision of someone collecting a paycheck for her grandchildren's tuition, injecting a tiny dose of dry irony that the rest of the cast promptly tramples underfoot. Randhir Kapoor plays the patriarch with a booming voice that suggests he recorded his dialogue in an echoey bathroom while waiting for his lunch order to arrive. By the time the climax arrives on a crowded beach with boats crashing into each other and extras running around in wet clothes, you are not laughing anymore, you are simply negotiating with your own patience. It is loud and bright and utterly exhausting, a film that leaves you with nothing to hold onto except a headache and the lingering suspicion that nobody involved had read the script all the way to the end.