There is a specific kind of background actor who looks like they won a contest to be on a film set, standing in the middle of a Mumbai nightclub sequence with a half-empty glass of warm ginger ale, staring directly into the lens while everyone else pretends to sway to a synthesized sitar beat. Tanveer Khan’s Miley Naa Miley Hum is full of them, but that is hardly the most distracting thing on screen. We are dealing with a vanity project of monumental proportions here, the kind of launchpad designed specifically to establish Chirag Paswan as the next great hope of Hindi cinema, despite the script treating his character like an afterthought in his own movie. It’s a messy business, this launch vehicle game, because the machinery required to hoist an untried actor into the spotlight usually crushes whatever little spontaneity the director might have wanted to capture in the first two acts. You watch the frame and you can feel the sweat coming off the financiers, praying that the wide shots hide the stiffness in the shoulders, hoping against hope that the audience will mistake vacant staring for smoldering intensity.

Chirag plays Anish, a tennis player with a backhand that looks entirely unconvincing whenever the camera cuts to a close-up of a neon-strung racket hitting a dead ball against a chain-link fence. Kangna Ranaut, operating in that strange transitional phase of her career where she hadn't yet fully weaponized her off-screen persona into her on-screen choices, plays Avani, a fashion designer who speaks mostly in breathless expository dialogue designed to explain why Anish is brooding by a swimming pool in Bangkok. They meet cute, or at least as cute as a screenplay written by a committee of anxious uncles can manage, over a dropped sketchbook that spills out designs which look like they were pulled from a 2004 catalogue for a second-tier export house in Noida. The chemistry between them is mostly theoretical, existing somewhere out in the ether between the lighting rigs and the craft services table rather than in the actual celluloid passing through the projector. When they argue, which is often and for reasons that dissolve the moment the scene cuts away, their voices bounce off the walls of these aggressively sterile hotel lobbies with the hollow ring of ADR recorded three weeks after the wrap party in a basement studio in Versova. It’s not great, not bad, just there, floating in the middle distance of your attention span while you wonder if you left the gas burner on at home. And then Kabir Bedi shows up as an industrialist with a silver goatee that deserves its own billing, wearing ascots in weather that clearly requires nothing heavier than a linen shirt, huffing his lines through a mustache that seems to have been glued on with rubber cement by a hair stylist who had already checked out for lunch.

The supporting cast does heavy lifting that borders on structural engineering. Poonam Dhillon and Mohsin Khan play the estranged parents with a grim determination to find dignity in scenes where they are required to stare longingly at old photo albums while a terribly mixed piano cue swells up from the lower registers to tell you precisely how sad you ought to be feeling. It reminds me of Kareena Kapoor walking through Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon in terms of sheer, unadulterated commitment to a sinking ship, though with far less neon and vastly more dialogue about family honor and corporate mergers. Sagarika Ghatge pops up as well, looking luminous and slightly confused as to why her character exists other than to hand Anish a towel and tell him his match is starting in ten minutes. There is an editing rhythm here that defies normal human perception, lingering on reaction shots of secondary characters nodding in agreement for three whole seconds after the dialogue has finished, as if the editor fell asleep with their thumb resting on the razor blade. It's a small thing but it bugged me every single time it happened, this sudden, leaden weight dropped right in the middle of a scene that was already struggling to find its footing.

Directorially, the film feels like it was assembled by three different people who never spoke to each other about what kind of movie they were making. The first half is a breezy, albeit incoherent, romantic comedy set against the backdrop of glittering urban landscapes that look like they were rented by the hour, while the second half lurches into a tear-jerking family drama involving terminal illnesses and long-lost letters found in leather trunks. It's the kind of tonal whiplash that used to be a staple of certain commercial Hindi films from the nineties, but here it just feels exhausting, a desperate attempt to throw every single cliché at the wall to see which one leaves a stain. The songs, composed by Sajid-Wajid, arrive with the predictability of a morning local train, interrupting the narrative flow just as someone is about to say something resembling an actual sentence. You get choreography that consists mostly of backup dancers waving flags while the lead actors stand still in the foreground looking intensely concerned about their hair gel. By the time the film reaches its climax in a hospital corridor that has been lit with the harsh, merciless white fluorescence of an operating theater, you aren't feeling catharsis, you're just looking at your watch and calculating how much longer you have to sit in the dark.

Cinematographer Johny Lal shoots everything with a high-contrast gloss that makes every surface look like it has been coated in a thin layer of cooking oil, smoothing out the pores of the actors until they resemble animated characters rendered on a mid-range laptop. It's a look that dominated a certain era of mid-budget romantic dramas, substituting actual mood with a blanket coat of amber gel lighting and endless soft-focus pans across chandeliers. Yet, beneath the aesthetic sludge and the calculated star-making machinery, there is a weird sort of sincerity to the enterprise that prevents you from dismissing it entirely out of hand. Chirag tries, God knows he tries, leaning into the emotional beats with an earnestness that occasionally disarms the cynicism built into the very concept of the project. He isn't ready to carry a feature film, and the camera knows it, exposing every moment of hesitation in his delivery like a cruel spotlight. Kangna, meanwhile, looks like she is already calculating her escape route to a better script, her eyes darting toward the edges of the frame with a restlessness that tells you everything you need to know about the creative atmosphere on set. The movie stumbles out of the gate and never quite manages to find a comfortable stride, collapsing under the weight of its own ambitions before the second reel has even finished spinning through the gate.

We are left with an artifact of a very specific moment in the evolution of mainstream cinema, when the old studio formulas were beginning to creak under the weight of changing audience expectations, yet producers kept stubbornly funding the exact same template because they couldn't imagine any other way to build a career from scratch. It doesn't anger you, and it certainly doesn't move you, existing instead in that vast grey zone of cinema where ambition completely outstrips execution and leaves behind a monument to good intentions gone slightly sideways. You walk out of the screening room into the harsh afternoon glare, and within ten minutes, the entire plot has evaporated from your memory like morning mist over the Arabian Sea, leaving behind only the faint, lingering echo of a synthesized flute solo that played during a romantic montage that went on for four minutes too long.