Varun Dhawan squints through a yellow tinted windshield in the opening reel of Badrinaath Ki Dulhaania and it immediately recalls that weird phase in 90s cinema where every hero drove a convertible they couldn't afford just to let the wind blow their frosted tips around. Shashank Khaitan’s second entry into whatever we are calling this franchise now is not a sequel so much as a loud do-over of Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, keeping the same leads and swapping out the bullet points of regional setting. Jhansi gets the aesthetic upgrade this time, complete with dusty heritage homes and local elections that serve as convenient narrative wallpaper whenever the romance needs to stall for twenty minutes. It’s a louder movie than its predecessor, chasing a broader palette with brighter mustard fields and neon bridal wear that practically vibrates against the Sony Venice sensors. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise kicks off with a level of sonic aggression that makes you reach for the volume rocker before anyone has even finished explaining why the boy needs to marry the girl right this second. The screenplay takes about half an hour to settle into a rhythm once the geography is established, lurching between regional comedy beats that feel imported from a mid-budget 2000s comedy and surprisingly dark tonal swerves about dowry demands that nobody quite knows how to stage without losing the cheerful momentum.

Khaitan directs with the blunt instrument approach to romantic comedy where subtlety is treated as a personal insult to the front-row ticket buyers who want whistling and dancing on cue. He relies too heavily on close-ups during dramatic turning points, holding on tear-streaked faces just long enough for the tension to completely dissolve into uncomfortable silence. There's a particular audio cue—a screeching string bend that plays every time Varun Dhawan's Badri looks bewildered by a modern concept—that repeats so often during the first hour you start counting the seconds between occurrences just to stay awake. The narrative mechanics are creaky, relying on accidental meetings in Singapore and improbable career trajectories that defy basic logic, but the editing by Manish Pradhan manages to keep things moving even when the plot logic completely falls apart during the second half. Alia Bhatt’s Vaidehi is written as a sharp, pragmatic career woman who apparently has zero friends outside her immediate family and spends all her free time brooding in starkly lit kitchens. When the film shifts gears into a social message about gender equality and female independence in the Hindi film industry, it stumbles over its own commercial obligations, trying to maintain the hero's alpha-male charm while simultaneously showing why his entire worldview is actually toxic rubbish.

Dhawan plays Badri with his usual frantic energy, pulling his mouth into perpetual frowns and shouting his dialogue with the forced urgency of someone trying to be heard over a lawnmower. It works in short bursts, especially when he's doing physical comedy that requires him to look genuinely baffled by a credit card machine, but the darker emotional notes land with a dull thud because he hasn't quite figured out how to make entitlement look vulnerable rather than merely annoying. You watch him and you keep thinking of Shah Rukh Khan in DDLJ, that specific brand of persistent suitor who doesn't take no for an answer, except here the filmmakers actually acknowledge that this behavior is borderline stalking without quite having the nerve to make him fully unlikable. Bhatt does the heavy lifting, anchoring the more ridiculous plot twists with eyes that suggest she is mentally calculating how fast she can walk out of the frame and catch a flight back to Mumbai. Her delivery of lines that sound like they were pulled directly from a pamphlet on women's empowerment saves scenes that would otherwise sink under the weight of their own didactic clunkiness. The supporting cast gets a rough deal, with Mohit Marwah popping up briefly to look brooding in tailored suits that look entirely too expensive for a middle-management corporate drone in Singapore, and Gauahar Khan showing up just long enough to remind everyone that she is usually the smartest person in the room regardless of how thin the writing gets.

Neha Parti Matiyani’s cinematography leans hard into the candy-colored aesthetic that defines modern commercial Bollywood, bathing every frame in high-contrast saturation that makes even the dusty streets of Jhansi look like a tourist board brochure. The night sequences in Singapore are all neon reflections and wet pavement sheen, giving the foreign locations a glossy detachment that keeps you at arm's length from the characters' emotional turmoil. It’s all very pretty in a screensaver sort of way, though the constant camera movement during stationary dialogue scenes starts to feel like a nervous tick by the time they reach the intermission. Then there is the soundtrack, which recycles the title track of Badrinaath Ki Dulhaania through so many variations—sad, fast, acoustic, remix—that you feel like you are trapped in a loop of a radio station that lost its flash drive. The actual songs are catchy enough while they play, featuring choreography by Bosco-Caesar that gives both actors plenty of space to show off their casual charm, but they interrupt the narrative flow so abruptly that you could lift three of them out of the runtime entirely without the plot losing a single beat of momentum. Hindi movies have always treated music as a narrative pause button, but here the songs feel less like extensions of the romance and more like contractual obligations that need to be checked off the production list before the next plot point can be dragged onto the screen.

Beneath the glossy veneer, the film wants to be a modern parable about the compromises women are forced to make within traditional patriarchal structures, yet it constantly trips over its own desire to keep the hero lovable and marketable. Badri’s journey from a possessive provincial boy to an understanding partner is rushed through a series of grand gestures that feel unearned, substituting shouting matches for genuine self-reflection. It is a recurring problem in contemporary popular culture, where acknowledging a social issue is treated as the same thing as actually exploring its systemic causes, leaving the characters to mouth progressive platitudes while the underlying power dynamics remain completely unchanged. The film wants Vaidehi to have agency, but her career ambitions are constantly framed through the prism of how they affect Badri's fragile ego, reducing her independence to a hurdle the hero must overcome to prove his worth. It’s a messy ideological tug-of-war that prevents the story from ever landing on a coherent emotional truth. The supporting characters exist merely to push the leads toward their inevitable reconciliation, robbed of any interior life or motivations beyond yelling advice about marriage and family honor over plastic-wrapped dining room tables. When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of a studio product that was workshopped to death in air-conditioned conference rooms until every sharp edge of actual social critique was sanded down into a harmless, marketable rom-com package.