The sound design during the London office sequence in English Babu Desi Mem is just slightly out of phase, and if I'm honest, that tiny audio hitch distracted me more than any plot hole ever could. It is a weird way to start a movie that wants to be a glossy transnational romance, but mid-nineties Bollywood was nothing if not a workshop where they hammered foreign locations onto indigenous melodramatic frameworks with whatever tools were lying around the editing bay. Director Praveen Nischol is trying to juggle two entirely different genres in the same two-and-a-half-hour runtime, shifting from a gritty custody dispute to a breezy musical caper without ever really finding the gears to make the transition feel smooth. The screenplay, credited to Akhtar-Ul-Iman, feels like it was written by two different people working in separate rooms who only communicated via sticky notes left on a coffee machine. Vikram Mayadash is introduced as a cold-hearted corporate titan living in England, but the moment he lands in India to claim his orphaned nephew, he starts wearing silk waistcoats that look like they were pulled from a theatrical storage locker in Bandra. That kind of tonal whiplash is everywhere in this picture, pulling you out of the emotional reality just as you are starting to settle in.

Shah Rukh Khan is playing a dual role here, and it is fascinating to watch him struggle against the script's limitations before he figured out how to bend these kinds of double-cast vehicles to his absolute will. Think of how effortlessly he navigates the twin personas in Duplicate, or even the way he handles the emotional weight of DDLJ from the previous year, and you can see him searching for the right register in this one. As the older brother Vikram, he is all sharp angles and stiff upper lips, though his English accent sounds less like a British executive and more like an elocution student trying very hard not to slip back into a Delhi street register. When he plays the younger, wilder brother Hari, the energy shifts dramatically into something much looser, almost too loose, where he is mugging for the back rows and chewing the scenery with an appetite that borders on reckless. It is an awkward performance because he never quite bridges the gap between the two men, leaving a gaping void right where the central emotional conflict should be living and breathing. He spends half his screen time looking like he would rather be anywhere else on the planet, which admittedly adds a strange, unintended layer of authenticity to a man forced to deal with a messy family inheritance against his will.

Then you have Sonali Bendre, who spends the first hour of the movie looking astonishingly glamorous while being asked to do almost nothing of actual dramatic substance. She plays Catherine, the woman who has raised the orphaned child with fierce maternal devotion, yet the camera treats her more like an editorial spread in a glossy magazine than a flesh-and-blood human being fighting for the survival of her adoptive family. Her introductory musical numbers are staged with a kind of reckless abandon that completely ignores whatever plot momentum the previous scene was trying to build, and while she looks radiant in every single frame, the performance lacks the grounded grit that someone like Smita Patil would have brought to the exact same role. Rajeshwari, playing the bubbly sidekick or confidante figure, has this one recurring giggle that repeats every time she enters a room, and it became the sort of minor auditory torture that makes you check your watch to see how many reels are left. The supporting cast is packed with reliable character actors who are clearly just cashing their checks and hoping the director yells cut before they have to deliver another clunky piece of exposition about trust funds and ancestral guilt. The chemistry between Khan and Bendre never catches fire because they are photographed in soft-focus close-ups that keep them trapped in separate visual universes, rarely ever sharing the same physical space in a convincing way.

The cinematography by Ishwar Bidri relies heavily on golden filters and hazy lens flares that make every outdoor location in London look like a travel brochure designed for tourists who never actually leave the hotel lobby. When the action shifts back to India, the lighting gets harsh and flat, losing whatever moody atmosphere the early scenes were desperately trying to establish. It is an uneven visual strategy that mirrors the patchy production values, where studio sets with fake ivy look painfully obvious against real location shots. The soundtrack, composed by Rajesh Roshan, features tracks that pop up at the most illogical narrative junctions, halting the momentum just as the emotional stakes are starting to climb a little bit. One particular upbeat number involves choreography that consists mostly of people running in circles around a fountain while Shah Rukh Khan does variations of his signature arm-spread pose, and it lingers on reaction shots of bystanders for three beats too long every single time. It is a small thing, but that editorial laziness adds up over the course of the narrative until every musical break feels like a chore you have to get through just to find out what happens to the kid.

At its core, the movie wants to say something about the collision between Western individualism and Indian family values, but it treats both concepts with such superficial gloss that the thematic ambition collapses under its own weight. Vikram represents the cold, money-obsessed diaspora, while Catherine and the child represent the warm, chaotic heart of the homeland, yet the script resolves this massive cultural gulf with a rushed courtroom settlement that makes zero legal or emotional sense. Hindi cinema has tackled this exact migration anxiety with much more nuance in other projects, and by comparison, this feels like a rough first draft that somehow made it past the censors and into the theaters without anyone stopping to ask if the pieces actually fit together. There is an interesting movie buried somewhere beneath the wardrobe changes and the over-scored dramatic realizations, but Nischol never digs deep enough to find it. You are left with a series of pretty pictures and loud musical numbers that don't amount to much once the house lights come back up.