Vicky Kaushal wears a sweater vest in the first twenty minutes of Bad Newz that looks like it cost more than my first secondhand scooter, and I kept thinking about that sweater vest while the plot tried to explain heteropaternal superfecundation with the breezy confidence of a high school biology teacher who skipped the seminar on human anatomy. Look, I don't know who cleared the wardrobe budget, but someone had a very specific brief involving pastel knits and aggressively distressed denim, and if I'm honest, the styling does half the heavy lifting before anyone even opens their mouth. Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with wealth, but here it is just deeply specific, right down to the artisanal sourdough loaves sitting on kitchen counters in apartments that no working-class person in Mumbai could ever sniff, let alone lease.

Director Anand Tiwari wants to recapture the high-gloss panic of Good Newwz, which makes sense on paper because formulas are comforting things in a box office climate that changes direction faster than a stray dog on a highway, but the gears grind a bit louder this time around. The premise relies on a medical freak accident where a woman becomes pregnant with twins by two different fathers, and the script treats this rare biological anomaly not as a terrifying medical crisis but as an excuse for two men to measure their biceps in a series of increasingly over-lit hotel bathrooms. The screenplay feels like it was written in a writers' room fueled entirely by iced Americanos and frantic post-it notes, jumping from slapstick set-pieces to emotional heart-to-hearts without ever finding a comfortable middle gear.

Vicky Kaushal plays Akhil Chadha, a man whose personality can be accurately described as an aggressive perfume ad brought to life, and he plays it with a looseness that suggests he realized halfway through the first schedule that prestige drama wasn't paying the rent on this particular flat. He bounces off Ammy Virk's more grounded, Punjabi-dad-in-waiting energy with an ease that prevents the rivalry from feeling like standard formulaic filler, even when the jokes get stuck in second gear. Triptii Dimri, meanwhile, plays Saloni with a kind of exhausted eye-roll that feels less like a character choice and more like a documentary record of a trained actor wondering how she ended up in a scene involving a rubber baby doll and three different camera angles. There is a moment where she has to deliver a monologue about bodily autonomy while wearing a silk bathrobe, and she manages to ground the absurdity just enough to keep the audience from checking their phones.

Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra pop up in cameo roles that feel less like narrative necessities and more like a text message sent between friends on a Tuesday afternoon asking if they're free to drop by the set for a quick laugh. Their brief appearances do not add much to the overarching plot, but they provide a momentary jolt of energy that the second act desperately needs before it slides back into montages of male bonding over prenatal yoga. The supporting cast is saddled with dialogue that belongs in a 2012 internet meme, yet they throw themselves at the material with a desperate enthusiasm that makes it hard to stay angry at the sheer predictability of the plotting.

Cinematographer Sunil Patel lights every single frame as though it's going to be used as a desktop wallpaper for a high-end appliance store in Bandra, which works for the glossy aesthetic until you realize you haven't seen a shadow in two hours. The soundtrack leans heavily on remixes of classic tracks that hit your eardrums with the subtlety of a falling anvil, and there's a specific dhol beat that repeats every time a character enters a room that started annoying me around the forty-minute mark. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every single scene transition is cushioned by the exact same rising synth swell, as if the editors were terrified we might forget we were watching a comedy if the music stopped for even three seconds.

Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to figure out how to talk about modern relationships without turning into a moral science lecture, and while this film doesn't invent a new vocabulary, it at least avoids the heavy-handed preaching that weighed down Jugjugg Jeeyo. The themes of shared parenting and career anxiety bubble beneath the surface of the jokes, though they are usually interrupted by another gag involving a pregnancy pillow or a misunderstanding at an obstetrician's office. You can see the bones of a smarter satire about modern masculinity hiding underneath the pastel knits, but the filmmakers clearly decided that silly pratfalls would play better in the multiplexes.

By the time the credits roll over a dance number that clearly required three separate choreography sessions and at least two costume changes per background dancer, you are left with the distinct sensation of having eaten a very large bag of buttered popcorn—delicious while it's happening, entirely devoid of nutritional value, and slightly heavy on the stomach by the time you reach the parking lot. It is not going to change the trajectory of commercial Hindi films, nor will it find a spot on any serious cinephile's year-end retrospective list. But if you have two hours to kill on a rainy Sunday afternoon and zero desire to think about geopolitics, inflation, or the future of narrative cinema, you could do worse than watching Vicky Kaushal lose a shouting match with a fruit basket.