Johnny Lever says one line early on about a pistol being loose in its holster, and if I am honest, that throwaway bit of business stays with you longer than half the plotting. E. Niwas directed Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega back in the summer of 2001, sliding it into a slot where Hindi movies were still trying to figure out if they wanted to be slick urban capers or keep singing songs in Swiss meadows. Ram Gopal Varma was behind the writing and production, which explains why everyone looks like they have been awake for three days straight and the color grading leans toward a bruised sort of teal that was everywhere in bollywood right then. The plot lifts its spine from Fargo, though nobody involved with the production seems particularly interested in snow-bound moral decay. Instead, we get a sunny Mumbai and Pune axis where desperate men hatch terrible kidnapping schemes because they need cash for a startup or an angry father-in-law. It is the kind of movie that gets remembered as a multi-starrer comedy even though the people on screen are sweating panic through every scene.

Saif Ali Khan is playing Prakash, an inventor who looks perpetually on the verge of a minor nervous breakdown because his investors think his gadget is useless. He has this wonderful, nervous little laugh he deploys whenever someone corners him about money, a twitchy rhythm that tells you everything you need to know about the guy before he even opens his mouth to pitch a kidnapping. Fardeen Khan and Aftab Shivdasani round out the male leads with varying degrees of exhaustion. Fardeen is the rich slacker who hates his wealthy father-in-law Dalip Tahil with a fiery, champagne-fueled intensity, while Aftab plays his hapless brother-in-law who gets dragged into the mess simply because he happened to be standing near a telephone. The screenplay keeps them running around in circles. They stumble through botched drop-offs and miscommunications that owe more to classic farce than gritty crime drama, keeping the momentum bouncy enough that you ignore the plot holes big enough to drive a Maruti Suzuki through.

Sonali Bendre and Twinkle Khanna don't get an awful lot to do besides look exasperated in expensive apartments, which feels like a waste of their comic timing. Twinkle Khanna has this deadpan delivery that could have cut through the frantic energy of the male leads if the script had given her actual scenes instead of reaction shots. Sharat Saxena pops up as a ruthless hitman who cannot quite believe how incompetent his employers are, playing his scenes with a weary scowl that grounds the more cartoonish elements of the caper. Then there is Dalip Tahil, roaring and barking orders from behind a mahogany desk like a man who genuinely believes he is in a completely different movie, possibly a dramatic weepie about generational wealth.

The cinematography by Hurmiz Dastoor relies heavily on aggressive zooms and wide-angle lenses that distort the edges of the frame just enough to make you feel slightly carsick. It matches the manic panic of the characters, though it makes some of the dialogue scenes look like they were shot on a soap opera budget. Anu Malik’s soundtrack features tracks that drop in without much warning, halting the narrative momentum every time someone needs to dance on a beach. It is a structural artifact of nineties bollywood movies that feels horribly dated here, interrupting the tight rhythm of the comedy for standard-issue romantic interludes that nobody asked for. Yet the background score hums along with a jazzy, bass-heavy urgency that saves the chase sequences from feeling totally weightless.

There is a specific kind of desperation that runs through Hindi films from this specific window, right before multiplexes changed what comedies were allowed to look like. People are always trying to get rich quick through some harebrained scheme involving stocks or fake jewelry or kidnapping their own relatives just to squeeze the old man for ransom. Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega captures that frantic middle-class anxiety without ever turning it into a heavy social message about greed. It is just about idiots making bad choices in broad daylight. You watch these three guys bicker over a ransom note written with cut-out magazine letters, and you realize the film works best when it lowers its ambitions and just lets the actors improvise their way through the awkward pauses.

It is not a masterpiece, and it falls apart in the final half-hour when everyone has to converge on a farmhouse for the inevitable shootout and misunderstandingfest. The editing in that climax gets so choppy that you lose track of who is holding which gun and why anyone is angry at anyone else. But Johnny Lever remains funny throughout, and Saif Ali Khan proves he had a distinct knack for playing neurotic screw-ups long before Dil Chahta Hai hit theaters later that same year and changed his entire career trajectory. That alone makes it worth digging up on a lazy afternoon when you want to watch people make absolute fools of themselves for two hours.