Abhishek Bachchan wears this strange, bright purple shirt in the second half of Bol Bachchan that I kept staring at whenever the dialogue got too repetitive. It has these shiny buttons. If I'm honest, that shirt became my anchor through forty-five minutes of broad physical comedy that relied entirely on people falling into tubs of paint or tumbling off ancient tractors.

Rohit Shetty directs like he is trying to outrun a fast-approaching train, which works fine until it doesn't. He takes the bones of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic Golmaal—the 1979 one starring Amol Palekar, not his own earlier franchise—and strips away every ounce of gentle irony to replace it with explosions, slow-motion swagger, and a colour palette that looks permanently saturated by noon in a Gujarat village. The screenplay by Yunus Sajawal and Farhad-Sajid operates on the simple mechanical logic of a cartoon anvil. Someone tells a lie. The lie grows hair. A moustache has to be twirled. Then everyone shouts at each other in a courtyard while camera pans whip back and forth so fast you miss whether the supporting actor in the background is actually reacting or just blinking against the dust kicked up by a Mahindra jeep.

Ajay Devgn plays Prithviraj Raghuvanshi, a feudal landlord who speaks broken English with absolute, terrifying conviction and has a heart of gold that he guards with an iron pipe. Devgn doesn't try to reinvent the wheel here. He leans into the stiffness that usually plagues his dramatic turns and converts it into a weird kind of deadpan authority. When he says lines like "Don't talk me wrong, I will talk you wrong," he delivers them with the straight face of a man reciting tax codes, which makes the absurdity land much harder than if he winked at the audience. Opposite him, Abhishek Bachchan splits himself in two as Abbas Ali and the fictional, god-fearing, moustachioed Abhishek Bachchan he has to pretend to be to secure a job. Abhishek is sweating through most of his scenes. He stretches his eyes wide, pulls his mouth into shapes that belong in a silent picture, and throws himself into Kathak numbers with a frantic energy that feels less like performance and more like survival. Asin and Prachi Desai drift through the periphery mostly as targets for reaction shots, though Asin manages a couple of genuinely funny physical beats when she has to pretend she is blind.

The cinematography by Dudley is so bright it gives you a mild headache if you watch it on a properly calibrated screen, a glare that flattens every brick wall and cotton field into a postcard from a tourist board that never existed. And then there's the soundtrack by Himesh Reshammiya, specifically the title track which seems to play every time a character successfully walks through a doorway. It's a small thing but it bugged me how the same four-note horn stinger hits whenever Prithviraj flexes his biceps, an audio cue that treats the audience like we forgot what happened twelve minutes prior.

There is a persistent, underlying anxiety about identity running through these Hindi films that usually gets buried under slapstick, and Bol Bachchan is no exception, even if it treats the politics of caste and region as a series of convenient setups for punchlines. The rich feudal lord is good-hearted as long as you respect his temples and his sister. The clever city boy has to lie about his religion and his manners just to survive in the rural economy. These ideas get tossed around between car chases and double entendres delivered by Asrani and Archana Puran Singh, who are both working overtime to salvage material that belongs in a much cheaper sketch show. Krishna Abhishek turns up as a sidekick with a stutter that belongs to an older, lazier era of screenwriting, the kind of crude shorthand that makes you cringe while the person sitting two rows ahead is howling with laughter.

It is not a good movie by any conventional measure of narrative cohesion or tonal balance. Yet there is a strange, grinding momentum to the way Shetty stacks set-piece on top of set-piece until the logic dissolves entirely. The climax involves a massive festival ground, forty stuntmen flying through the air on invisible wires, and a villain who gets defeated through a complicated series of misunderstandings involving a cricket bat. You walk out of the theater wondering why you spent two and a half hours watching Abhishek Bachchan shout about honesty while wearing a purple shirt, but you also remember the exact rhythm of Devgn delivering his mangled proverbs.