Vivek Oberoi wears a pastel green blazer about three scenes too many in Jayanta Bhai Ki Luv Story, and if I am honest, that wardrobe choice stays in your head longer than half the plotting. You sit there in the dark watching a romance unfold between a small-time Mumbai gangster and an aspiring lyricist, and you keep wondering who actually approved a jacket that shade of mint for a guy trying to look like a hardened enforcer. It is a strange little distraction, but Bollywood movies have long thrived on these odd aesthetic choices where the costume department seems to be living in a slightly different decade than the lighting crew. The film itself dropped quietly into theaters back in 2013 without generating much noise, getting lost in the shuffle of mid-budget romantic comedies that tried to balance the grit of the underworld with the glossy sweetness of a fairy tale. Kumar Taurani produced it under the Tips banner, handing the directorial reins to debutant Vinnil Markan, who clearly watched a lot of Ram Gopal Varma films growing up before deciding he actually preferred the sunny disposition of early twenty-first-century Yash Raj productions. You can feel that tug-of-war in almost every frame, a persistent hesitation between showing the harsh realities of local extortion and staging cute misunderstandings over cups of cutting chai.

Markan and his writer, Kiran Kotian, lean heavily into the trope where a tough guy is forced to share living space with an innocent young woman, creating an immediate domestic friction that is supposed to be funny and touching all at once. The screenplay stumbles quite a bit whenever it tries to explain how Jayanta Bhai actually makes a living, glossing over the violence with soft-focus establishing shots of rainy Marine Drive while characters talk casually about collecting protection money. It reminds you of how Company handled the underworld with a terrifying, clinical precision, though Jayanta Bhai Ki Luv Story is allergic to that kind of darkness and prefers to keep things light even when weapons are drawn. The dialogue has this strange habit of trying to sound street-smart while using phrases that nobody from the gullies of Borivali has ever uttered out loud, leading to line readings that feel slightly rehearsed even from seasoned performers like Nasser. Shishir Sharma shows up as the stern father figure in a couple of brief sequences, doing heavy lifting with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a disapproving sigh, while the camera pans past generic office interiors that look like they were rented by the hour.

Then there is Neha Sharma as Simran, playing the quintessential girl-next-door who loses her job, gets evicted from her apartment, and somehow manages to maintain a blowout that defies the humidity of coastal Maharashtra. She does decent work with a character written mostly as a collection of reactions to Jayanta's antics, though her chemistry with Oberoi feels intermittent rather than electric. Oberoi plays the titular gangster with a permanent grin and a swagger that tries to mask the underlying sweetness of the script, occasionally dipping into a self-parody mode that works surprisingly well when he is just joking around with his sidekicks. He is not reinventing the romantic hero here, but he has an easy charm that prevents the picture from becoming entirely unwatchable during the saggy second act where the narrative mechanics grind to a complete halt just to insert a mandatory wedding song. When they look at each other across a crowded Mumbai rooftop, you believe they are fond of one another, even if the surrounding scenes are busy staging contrived misunderstandings involving mistaken identities and intercepted mobile phones.

Sachin-Jigar handle the music, and while the tracks are catchy enough in that disposable mid-2000s club style, the background score has this relentless habit of underlining every single emotion with a heavy synth beat that leaves no room for silence. It is a loud picture in all the wrong ways, drowning out subtle acting choices with sweeping string arrangements whenever a character so much as sighs. The cinematography by Sameer Arya relies on a golden, washed-out palette that makes everything look like an extended commercial for high-end real estate, draining the actual grit out of the locations until the slums look like carefully curated stage sets. You find yourself noticing things like the boom mic dipping into the top corner of a wide shot during a tense confrontation on a railway platform, or the way the background extras are clearly just standing around waiting for the director to yell cut instead of behaving like real commuters. These are small mechanical errors that pile up over two hours, wearing down your patience long before the predictable reconciliation scene rolls around in the final reel.

Hindi cinema has a long history of romanticizing the criminal underworld, turning extortionists and thugs into misunderstood softies with hearts of gold as long as they treat the leading lady with absolute respect. Jayanta Bhai Ki Luv Story doesn't add anything new to that well-worn tradition, instead opting to coast entirely on the residual star power of its lead actor and the bright colors of its art direction. It is a film that exists purely to fill an afternoon cable television slot on a rainy Sunday, the kind of movie you leave on in the background while folding laundry or scrolling through your phone without really missing a beat. The themes of class disparity and urban displacement are raised only to be immediately batted away by a jaunty dance number or a humorous scuffle with local cops who act more like sitcom extras than actual law enforcement officers. By the time the credits start rolling over a blooper reel, you are left with the distinct impression that nobody involved in the production was trying to make high art, which is fine, except they didn't make a particularly engaging piece of commercial entertainment either, leaving the whole endeavor stranded in that awkward middle ground where it is neither bad enough to laugh at nor good enough to care about.