There is a specific kind of dead-eyed charm that Ranbir Kapoor tries to sell about twenty minutes into Besharam, leaning against a stolen car with his collar popped and a smirk that feels like it was workshopped in a closed-door focus group, and if I'm honest, it made me miss the messy desperation of his work in Rocket Singh just a little bit too much.

Abhinav Kashyap walked onto this set with the kind of goodwill usually reserved for returning war heroes after the massive, teeth-gritting success of Dabangg, but lightning refuses to strike twice when you swap out Salman Khan's immovable gravitational pull for a breezy, slightly desperate con man named Babli who spends half his time dodging two cops played by actual parents Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh, which should have been a meta-textual goldmine of family dynamics and genuine friction on screen. Instead, the director treats his own camera like it is strapped to the front of a roller coaster built by people who hate turns, whipping from wide shots of sun-baked Delhi highways to aggressively close coverage of actors delivering dialogue that sounds like it was rewritten during a catering break. The screenplay meanders through plot points involving orphanages and corrupt politicians with the casual, unfocused indifference of someone flipping through a magazine in a dentist's waiting room, never quite deciding whether it wants to be a gritty street-level caper or a pastel-soaked romantic comedy where nobody has to pay rent.

Pallavi Sharda arrives as Tara, the female lead whose primary function in the narrative seems to be standing near automobiles while the wind machine works overtime on her hair, though she occasionally gets to deliver lines with an exasperated sigh that feels like the only honest reaction anyone has to the script. The supporting cast does what they can with material that treats subtlety as a personal insult to the audience, resulting in performances that ricochet wildly between cartoonish villainy and sitcom-level mugging. Amitosh Nagpal as Babli's sidekick has this one running gag where he adjusts his glasses with a wet sound effect that I am almost certain was added in post-production, and it's a small thing but it bugged me every single time he did it because the audio mixing throughout the entire second half feels like it was cobbled together in a damp basement.

When Rishi and Neetu Singh share the frame, there's a fleeting spark of actual life, two veterans of Hindi cinema falling back on decades of muscle memory to sell lines that would otherwise land with a wet thud against the carpet. They play Chulbul and Bulbul Chautala, a pair of bored inspectors who treat police work like an annoying errand between lunch breaks, and their weary exchanges are easily the best things in a movie that usually prefers to yell its jokes directly into your ear. But the film keeps pulling them back into the orbit of Ranbir's relentlessly bouncy protagonist, a character whose entire personality can be summarized as a leather jacket looking for a place to happen.

Lalit Pandit's soundtrack hits you over the head with the subtlety of a falling anvil, recycling the title track until your brain turns to mush and you start questioning your life choices on a Tuesday afternoon. Every time Babli walks anywhere near a vehicle, the brass section kicks in with this blaring, brassy loop that tries to manufacture momentum for scenes where two people are literally just standing around talking about towing fees. The cinematography by Madhu Amhaat doesn't help matters, washing every single exterior in a high-contrast yellow filter that makes Delhi look less like a real metropolis and more like a dusty commercial for a brand of motor oil nobody buys anymore. We are constantly told through voiceover and frantic editing that our hero is a lovable rogue with a heart of gold, yet the camera lingers on his smug expression for three beats too long after every punchline, killing the rhythm dead before the next scene can even start.

There is an entire subgenre of commercial bollywood movies built entirely around the premise that an actor's personal charisma can substitute for an actual narrative arc, but even the most dedicated fans might find their patience wearing thin when the plot stalls out for a ten-minute dance sequence that contributes precisely nothing to the characters or the stakes. Babli steals cars for an orphanage, which is the kind of flimsy moral justification screenwriters pull out of a hat when they want their protagonist to commit grand theft auto without making the ticket buyers feel guilty about munching their popcorn. The thematic concerns of the picture—class resentment, the crumbling safety nets of the city's outskirts, the invisible labor of mechanics and petty thieves—get buried under wave after wave of obnoxious background score and slapstick routines involving oversized dogs and falling paint cans.

It is strange to watch a project featuring three members of the Kapoor family look this aggressively disjointed, as if everyone agreed to show up for the poster shoot but forgot to coordinate their schedules for the actual dramatic heavy lifting. You can sense the ghost of better comedies hovering around the edges of the frame, perhaps because the setup borrows heavily from classic con artist tropes that have been worn smooth by decades of repetition in the industry. Yet those older hindi films usually understood that charm requires a certain baseline of peril, whereas here everyone knows the hero is going to walk away from every explosion with his hair still perfectly gelled and his scarf fluttering in the breeze.

The pacing collapses completely during the third act, dragging us through a series of predictable double-crosses and heartfelt speeches about chosen family that feel cribbed from a much more boring script found at the bottom of a recycling bin. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in an abandoned warehouse that looks suspiciously like every other abandoned warehouse built on a studio backlot since nineteen-eighty-five, you stop caring about who gets the money or who gets the girl and just start wondering if the traffic outside is going to be terrible on the drive home.

Ranbir Kapoor remains one of our most interesting performers when he is allowed to play internal damage and quiet neurosis, but forcing him into the mold of a loud, unapologetic crowd-pleaser yields results that are neither fish nor fowl, stumbling awkwardly between genuine star power and desperate pandering. Maybe the real problem is that modern commercial cinema in this country has become too scared of letting its heroes simply fail for five minutes without immediately offering a redemption arc backed by a rousing chorus of dhol drums. Or maybe it is just a bad script shot in a hurry with too many extras and not enough coffee.