Sidharth Malhotra wears a neon pink jacket in the middle of a dusty Patna street and if I'm honest that single wardrobe choice told me everything I needed to know about how this production viewed the state of Bihar. Prashant Singh directs Jabariya Jodi like a man who has only ever seen small-town Uttar Pradesh through the smeared window of an AC coach passing through at night.

Abhay Singh is a muscle-bound local strongman who runs a lucrative kidnapping syndicate for eligible bachelors who demand too much dowry, snatching them off roads and marrying them off at gunpoint with the full tacit approval of terrified local families. He operates with total impunity because the police are corrupt and his father is worse, played by Javed Jaffrey with a heavy greasepaint mustache and a tired grin that suggests he cashed his check before walking onto the set.

Parineeti Chopra enters as Babli Yadav, a childhood sweetheart with a grudge and a baseball bat, stomping into rooms with the kind of aggressive dialogue delivery that used to pass for fierce female agency in mid-tier Hindi films. The script by Sanjeev K. Jha tries to frame this forced-marriage custom as a social crusade mixed with a romance, but the tone lurches violently from slapstick comedy to grim social reality without ever stopping anywhere believable.

Malhotra spends the first half of the runtime looking deeply confused by his own accent, dropping into a forced Bhojpuri twang only when the director remembers he is supposed to be playing a native son of the soil rather than a model on a billboard who accidentally wandered onto a railway platform.

The supporting actors are clearly dubbed by studio artists in Mumbai who didn't bother matching the lip movements of the extras sweating under the afternoon sun, leaving every outdoor confrontation sounding like a radio drama broadcast from a tin shed. It's a small thing that bugged me all the way through the interval block.

Cinematographer Vishal Sinha lights every single scene as though it were a commercial for cooking oil, washing out the grit of the actual locations until they resemble the backlot sets of Bandra studios.

There is an electronic dhol track that plays every time Chopra gets angry, thumping away at the eardrums with a relentless lack of imagination that makes you long for the quieter, dirtier textures of Gangs of Wasseypur or even Tanu Weds Manu.

The second half introduces a political angle involving a rival politician and an election, turning a messy kidnapping farce into an even messier administrative drama where nobody seems to care about the missing grooms anymore.

Chopra and Malhotra have zero romantic chemistry, standing three feet apart in every emotional close-up as if social distancing was invented years before its time, trading insults that lack any bite or comic rhythm.

Jaffrey tries to rescue his scenes by chewing the scenery with theatrical abandon, rolling his Rs and waving his hands like he is performing for the balcony seats in a touring Parsi theater.

Singh stages the wedding sequences with all the visual flair of a wedding videographer who was paid half his advance up front and decided to pack up his gear before the varmala ceremony finished.

Bollywood has spent decades romanticizing the chaotic politics of the Hindi heartland, but recent hits managed to find genuine human desperation underneath the colorful turbans and country pistols, whereas this picture just offers up bright clothes and flat punchlines.

The pacing collapses around the two-hour mark when the narrative pauses for an extended subplot involving a kidnapping victim who actually falls in love with his captors, a bizarre moral pivot that the screenplay abandons five minutes later without any resolution.

By the time the closing credits roll over a mandatory item song featuring actors who look like they are checking their watches off-camera, you are left wondering who greenlit a romantic comedy about a serious felony.

Malhotra gives a performance of staggering passivity, absorbing dialogue and plot twists with the exact same dead-eyed stare whether he is beating up a rival goon or confessing his undying love in a wheat field.

Chopra screams her way through emotional breakdowns that register as mildly annoying rather than tragic, leaning heavily on head-tosses and heavy eyeliner to do the work that actual character writing refused to handle.

The soundtrack is a blur of generic party numbers that vanish from memory the second the track changes to another loud remix.

It is a movie that mistakes volume for energy and regional costumes for cultural authenticity, leaving a hollow impression that fades faster than cheap dye in a Patna monsoon.