Sanjay Dutt pronounces the word suitcase with a weird nasal drawl that sticks in your ear for days afterward, and if I am honest, that is the single most memorable sonic event in the entire two-hour runtime of Rascals. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he picked up his luggage on screen, which happens way too frequently because the plot hinges on identical bags being swapped at an airport terminal in Bangkok. Hindi films have relied on baggage mix-ups since the black-and-white era, yet director David Dhawan manages to make this particular iteration feel less like a nostalgic nod and more like an administrative error that somehow got greenlit with a multi-crore budget. The screenplay operates on the assumption that if characters scream their punchlines loud enough, the audience will forget that the setup was dead on arrival, leading to stretches of narrative where logic is thrown out the window entirely in favor of people hitting each other with rubber chickens and oversized inflatable hammers.

Ajay Devgn usually brings a certain coiled intensity to his roles, looking like a man who would rather be anywhere else than listening to his co-star improvise a flatulent joke, and here that natural exhaustion actually works in favor of his character, who is supposed to be a hardened criminal tired of petty scams. He wears these brightly colored shirts that look like they were purchased from a discount bin in Goa during monsoon season, and he drags his feet through chase sequences with the weary resignation of an accountant running for a suburban bus. Beside him, Sanjay Dutt plays a rival con man with the aggressive enthusiasm of a substitute gym teacher trying to get middle schoolers excited about dodgeball, grinning through scenes that require him to dress up as a geriatric doctor or a French art dealer with a terrible wig. They bounce off each other with all the kinetic grace of two heavy pieces of furniture being shoved down a carpeted flight of stairs. When they are supposed to be engaged in a deadly game of one-upmanship, they look instead like old acquaintances waiting for a delayed flight at Terminal 3, trading insults that probably sounded funnier on paper during a script reading session over bad coffee.

Kangana Ranaut and Lisa Haydon show up as the romantic interests, though calling them characters feels like a generous overstatement of their narrative function, since their primary job involves standing near swimming pools in resort wear and reacting to the male leads shouting at each other. Ranaut tries to inject some actual comedic timing into her scenes, raising an eyebrow at the sheer stupidity unfolding around her, but the editing room cuts away from her reaction shots a beat too soon, ruining whatever micro-expression she managed to pull off. Haydon gets lumbered with a role that requires her to speak mostly in accented English while walking in slow motion across hotel lobbies, a visual trope that feels lifted straight out of a mediocre calendar shoot rather than a narrative feature. Arjun Rampal drifts through the periphery as a polished villain who is apparently too wealthy and sophisticated to participate in the actual physical comedy, looking out at the chaos with a polite, frozen smile that suggests his agent promised him a very different movie when he signed the contract. Chunky Pandey and Satish Kaushik pop up in various disguises that involve fake mustaches that keep peeling off at the corners under the harsh studio lights, chewing the scenery with an unhinged desperation that makes you want to look away from the screen out of sheer secondhand embarrassment.

The cinematography by Johny Lal relies heavily on saturated primary colors that bleed into one another during the numerous song sequences filmed on pristine Thai beaches, turning the frame into a wall-to-wall smear of turquoise and neon pink. Every single establishing shot of Bangkok looks like it was licensed directly from a tourism board promotional video shot in 2004, complete with saturated sunsets and drone footage of traffic jams soundtracked by synth-heavy beats. Speaking of the music, the recurring theme song by Himesh Reshammiya uses a vocal sample that repeats every single time someone opens a door or looks surprised, wearing out its welcome long before the intermission card drops. Bollywood movies have a long history of leaning on musical cues to telegraph emotional shifts, but here the background score behaves like an obnoxious neighbor who refuses to turn down his television at three in the morning, hammering the same four-note motif until your temples start throbbing.

The underlying themes of the picture, if one can even apply such a heavy word to a project this weightless, revolve around greed, deception, and the eternal comedy of middle-aged men refusing to grow up, wearing Hawaiian shirts and chasing women half their age through hotel corridors. It is the kind of frantic urban caper where nobody learns a single lesson, nobody undergoes any internal growth, and the status quo is restored purely because the film ran out of film stock or money, whichever came first. Hindi cinema has produced some genuinely great farce over the decades, work that makes you dizzy with its precision, and watching a sloppy attempt at the same genre makes you appreciate the intricate clockwork of something like Andaz Apna Apna all over again. There is no joy in watching seasoned performers struggle against a script that treats them like props in a traveling variety show, reduced to making funny faces and falling backward into swimming pools just to fill the dead air between commercial breaks.

By the time the credits begin to crawl upward over yet another out-of-focus beach shot, you are left with the distinct impression of having witnessed a group of professionals clocking in, collecting their daily check, and trying their absolute hardest not to look directly at the camera while executing a poorly choreographed slapstick routine. The supporting actors are clearly dubbed by people who recorded their lines in a small, carpeted closet with a cheap USB microphone, creating a bizarre acoustic disconnect where the dialogue sounds like it is happening inside a tin can while the visual takes place on a windy pier. It is not an offensive disaster that makes you angry, nor is it a misunderstood camp classic waiting for rediscovery by a clever film historian on the internet, sitting instead in that vast gray middle where things go to be forgotten until they pop up on a late-night cable channel while you are folding laundry.