Fardeen Khan wearing a vest that costs more than my car while looking deeply concerned about a baby wipe is about as close as you get to the actual texture of Heyy Babyy, which is a movie that somehow convinced audiences in two thousand and seven that three overgrown lads living in a bachelor pad in Sydney could be reformed by an infant dropped on their doorstep. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise rests on a level of narrative convenience that would make a soap opera writer blush, but Sajid Khan, stepping behind the camera for his directorial debut, moves the chaos along with enough loud, blinding energy that you barely notice the plot holes you could drive a double-decker bus right through.

The screenplay borrows heavily from Three Men and a Baby, though it swaps out the gritty grit of American or French apartment living for a sun-bleached, pastel-tinted fantasy Australia that looks less like Sydney and more like a high-end commercial for a real estate agency, which makes sense given the director's background in television. There is no real breathing room in the narrative; scenes crash into each other with the subtlety of a falling anvil, and even the emotional beats are hammered home with a brass section that refuses to quit. Every single dramatic pivot is telegraphed ten minutes in advance by a sudden shift in lighting or a swelling string arrangement that tells you precisely how you should be feeling about Akshay Kumar cradling a plastic doll that occasionally CGI-winks at the audience.

Akshay Kumar plays Arush, a professional ladies' man whose apartment features a rotating bed and so many mirrors you wonder if he spends his entire morning inspecting his biceps, and he attacks this role with a frantic, sweating desperation that works surprisingly well for the first hour before wearing completely thin. Opposite him, Ritesh Deshmukh and Fardeen Khan provide the kind of broad, reactive physical comedy that Bollywood movies relied on heavily during that decade, pulling faces and screaming at ceiling fans whenever the baby cries. Boman Irani shows up later as a priest with a penchant for bizarre counselling methods, and he's clearly having a ball chewing up the scenery while wearing a clerical collar that looks slightly too tight around his neck.

Vidya Balan enters the frame midway through to drop the emotional anchor, playing a mother caught in a melodramatic web of misunderstandings and forced separations, and her performance feels like it belongs in an entirely different picture shot in a different hemisphere. While the three male leads are running around in oversized suits shouting their lines at the top of their lungs, Balan tries to find some actual human truth in a script that treats her character less like a person and more like a plot device with a saree. It’s a jarring mismatch of acting styles that director Sajid Khan does nothing to smooth over, letting the tonal whiplash between slapstick comedy and tear-jerking domestic tragedy rattle the viewer right down to their teeth.

The cinematography by Sunil Patel bathes every frame in an aggressive, sun-drenched golden hour glow that makes even a dirty diaper look like it was styled by a Vogue layout editor, though the editing by Rameshwar S. Bhagat desperately needed about twenty minutes carved out of the middle act. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy provide a soundtrack that dominated the charts back then, particularly the title track which still pops up at every wedding reception in the country, even if the mixing on some of the background score makes the dialogue sound like it was recorded inside a tin bucket. It is a loud, glossy, relentlessly commercial artifact of its time, capturing a specific phase of Hindi films where style routinely elbowed substance right out of the room.

There's a recurring gag involving a teething ring that gets misplaced in three consecutive scenes, and someone in the sound department forgot to match the room tone, so every time that little plastic rattle hits the hardwood floor it sounds like a gunshot in an empty cathedral, which is a small thing to fixate on but it drove me slightly mad by the time the interval rolled around. Beneath the designer clothes and the aggressively cheerful set design, the movie attempts to grapple with notions of domestic responsibility and the terrifying prospect of emotional maturity for men who refuse to grow up, but it frames these lessons through such a lens of misogyny and farce that any genuine sentiment gets lost in the noise.

Indian cinema has certainly produced worse comedies, and it has certainly produced much better examinations of accidental fatherhood, but Heyy Babyy remains stuck in that awkward middle tier where the production values write checks the script can never quite cash. By the time the credits sequence arrives, featuring the entire cast dancing in matching white linen, you aren't left with much to ponder, just a faint ringing in your ears and the lingering suspicion that nobody involved in the making of this picture had ever actually been within ten feet of a real baby.