The sound design during the opening reel of David Dhawan’s Chashme Baddoor is loud enough to rattle the cheap plastic seating of a Thursday afternoon press screening. It is an obnoxious little problem, if I am being honest, but it sets the exact temperature for the ninety minutes of aggressively bright colors and relentless background cues that follow. Remaking Sai Paranjpye’s 1981 classic was always a fool’s errand because the original relied on a shaggy, unassuming charm that modern Hindi films discarded somewhere around the turn of the millennium. Dhawan, working from a script by Farhad-Sajid, throws out the gentle rhythm of Delhi university life and replaces it with a hyperactive cartoon universe. The actors are dressed in primary colors that practically vibrate off the screen. Even the Goa sequences look less like a vacation spot and more like a giant paint factory exploded inside a soundstage.

Siddharth and Divyendu Sharma play the desperate roommates with a kind of desperate mugging that feels exhausted before the interval even hits. They scream their lines. They pull faces. When Siddharth attempts to look lovesick, he usually just looks like he is experiencing a sudden and violent migraine. Sharma, who was so brilliantly terrifying in Gangs of Wasseypur, here reduces his entire comic arsenal to a repeating cycle of regional accents and goggly-eyed disbelief. They chase Taapsee Pannu through libraries and streets while Ali Zafar looks on from the sidelines with the weary detachment of a man who realized three days into the shoot that his contract could not be broken without a penalty. Zafar plays the poet with a straight face, which is the right call, though it leaves a massive black hole right in the center of the buddy dynamic.

Pannu arrives in Bollywood movies with a distinct physicality that sets her apart from the standard-issue glamorous mannequin, but here she is asked to do very little besides look unimpressed by the advances of various goofy men. She has a sharp delivery. When she drops a sarcastic retort, she actually lands it without winking at the camera. The editing often cuts away from her face a fraction of a second too early, robbing her punchlines of their proper weight and ruining the rhythm of her scenes. It’s a small thing but it bugged me throughout the second act, especially during the apartment confrontations where the spatial geography of the room seems to shift every time the camera reverses angles.

The soundtrack by Sajid-Wajid is stuffed with generic dance numbers that sound like they were recycled from three different Salman Khan projects and dumped into this one because the budget allowed for it. They use the same four-note motif every time a character tries to look sneaky or romantic, and by the third time it plays during a mundane bike ride, you just want to reach for the volume knob. The cinematography by Sunil Patel is flatly lit in that specific, digital way that makes every exterior look like a high-end furniture showroom. There is no shadow. There is no texture. Every single frame is scrubbed clean of any human grit, leaving behind a shiny plastic surface that reflects the overhead lights of multiplexes.

The underlying themes of friendship and class aspiration are handled with the subtlety of a falling brick. The original film understood the specific poverty and ambition of middle-class students sharing a rented room in a crumbling Delhi locality. This version treats that same poverty as a cute aesthetic choice, a funny costume the boys wear before they get to dance on a beach in oversized sunglasses. Rishi Kapoor pops up in a dual role that feels entirely improvised on the fly, barking lines about the old days with an energy that easily outclasses everyone half his age on screen. His appearance generates a brief spark of actual warmth that the rest of the picture works very hard to extinguish.

Comedy in contemporary hindi movies often relies on repeating a moderately amusing bit until it loses all meaning, and this script takes that habit to an almost impressive extreme. Characters fall into swimming pools. Doors slam on fingers. Women are tricked by elaborate, nonsensical schemes that would not fool a moderately alert badger. The plot mechanics creak and groan like an old staircase under heavy foot traffic, yet the directors rush past every narrative hole with another loud brassy chord from the orchestra. You are supposed to laugh simply because the volume went up, which works about as well as tickling yourself in a mirror.

What remains after the credits clear is a mild ringing in the ears and a vague sense that nobody involved cared very much about whether the jokes landed. It sits there in your memory as a blur of turquoise shirts and bleached beaches, completely lacking the melancholic sting of the original story about youth fading away. The boys never feel like real students who study or fail exams or worry about rent. They are just vessels for product placement and frantic editing cuts. By the time the final group hug happens under a painted sunset, you have stopped caring which girl ends up with which boy.