Lisa Haydon running on a beach in slow motion has probably funded more than one retirement account in the suburbs of Mumbai, if I am being honest about the visual grammar we are dealing with here. Abhishek Sharma’s 2014 comedy *The Shaukeens* starts with a premise so dusty you can practically hear the props department sneezing, remaking the Basu Chatterjee classic *Shaukeen* with a cast that looks like they were assembled via a random generator in a talent agency basement. Three aging men decide to take a trip to Mauritius because their lives in Delhi have grown uniformly beige and domestic, which is a fine excuse to deploy Anupam Kher, Annu Kapoor, and Piyush Mishra to an island resort and hope something funny happens between the poolside lounging and the dialogue scenes. They play lifelong friends whose collective libido has outlived their dignity, chasing after a lifestyle blogger named Ahana who treats them with the polite exhaustion usually reserved for telemarketers.

The screenplay by Tigmanshu Dhulia tries very hard to graft a contemporary sensibility onto material that inherently belongs to a different decade, resulting in jokes about social media followers sitting uncomfortably next to bawdy double entendres that sound like they were recycled from forgotten nineties VHS cassettes. Sharma directs with the frantic energy of someone trying to stop a leak in a dam using chewing gum, cutting away from punchlines before they can land because the editorial room clearly panicked over the pacing. There is an entire subplot involving a jealous boyfriend played by Naveen Polishetty that exists purely to pad out the runtime, which already feels twenty minutes too long even though the movie clocks in under two hours. The camera work by Amalendu Chaudhary has that hyper-saturated, sun-bleached look common to mid-budget hindi films shot abroad, where every palm tree looks aggressively scrubbed and every hotel lobby resembles a timeshare brochure. You get endless aerial shots of the turquoise ocean that serve no narrative purpose other than reminding the financier where the money went.

Then there is Akshay Kumar playing a fictionalized version of himself, an alcoholic, womanizing movie star who spends his days trashing hotel rooms and crying into his whiskey because nobody appreciates his inner artist. It is a bizarre, deeply narcissistic performance that functions as both a self-parody and a weirdly defensive PR exercise, as if Kumar wanted to acknowledge his own box-office supremacy while simultaneously begging the audience to know he can feel sadness behind the tinted sunglasses. He shares most of his scenes with Haydon, who models clothes with genuine professional ease while struggling immensely with line delivery that requires her to sound like a real person rather than a Pinterest board come to life. Kher, Kapoor, and Mishra save the picture from complete disaster simply through the sheer volume of their collective goodwill with the audience, finding pockets of genuine pathos in scenes where they are forced to argue over hair dye and Viagra. They have a lived-in camaraderie that reminds you of how good Basu Chatterjee's original actors were, even if they are now working with a script that treats subtlety like a personal insult. There is a small thing about the sound mixing that bugged me the whole way through, where Kapoor’s dialogue sounds like it was looped in a damp cupboard three weeks after principal photography wrapped, completely detached from the ambient beach noise.

Hindi movies of this specific era were obsessed with stuffing soundtracks with EDM-infused item numbers that had zero relation to the emotional arc, and *The Shaukeens* is no exception, dropping Honey Singh tracks into scenes with the subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window. The songs interrupt the narrative flow constantly, functioning as speed bumps that derail whatever minor character development has managed to eke out between the comedy sketches. It is a loud, abrasive collection of tracks that date the film instantly, anchoring it firmly to a specific two-year window when everyone in the industry thought bass drops could fix a limp script. Mishra gets a few moments to mutter cynical poetry under his breath, and those are the only times the soundtrack actually respects the actors inhabiting the frame, letting silence do some heavy lifting for a change. Otherwise, it is wall-to-wall synthetic beats designed to keep you awake during sequences where nothing of consequence happens.

Bollywood comedies often struggle with the line between harmless wish fulfillment and outright sadism toward older protagonists, and this film dances across that boundary with very little grace. The three men are consistently humiliated for wanting romance at an age when society prefers they sit quietly in a park playing carrom, yet the film never grants them enough internal dignity to make their eventual humiliation feel earned rather than mean-spirited. Ahana is framed as a modern, liberated woman because she wears crop tops and ignores their awkward advances, but the script still reduces her to a prize to be won by whichever man proves himself least pathetic. This dynamic drains the comedy of its charm, leaving behind a residue of mild desperation that feels a bit too close to reality to be funny. It lacks the gentle observational humor that made Indra Kumar’s *Masti* occasionally work despite its vulgarity, opting instead for a shrill, frantic tone that mistakes shouting for comedic timing. When the credits finally roll, you are left wondering who this movie was actually made for, since the older viewers won't appreciate the relentless EDM beats and the younger crowd certainly won't care about three grandfathers pining for a lifestyle blogger in Mauritius.