Shah Rukh Khan has this very specific squint he does when he is trying to look pained and determined at the same time, and it shows up about four minutes into Happy New Year before anyone has even mentioned a heist, a diamond, or a dance competition. If I'm honest, it set my teeth on edge immediately. It is the look of a man who knows he is carrying four hundred crores on his shoulders and wants you to feel the weight of every single rupee. Farhan Akhtar managed to make a caper about middle-class Mumbai feel breezy with Don, but Farah Khan treats the genre like a state funeral where everyone is wearing neon sequins. The movie sprawls across three hours of bruised egos, locker-room philosophy, and back-alley martial arts that look like they were choreographed by someone who only learned about fighting from old music videos.

The plot hinges on a revenge scheme involving a dirty locker, a dead father, and a world dance championship in Dubai that appears to be funded by an endless supply of dry ice and lens flare. Charlie, played by Khan with his hair dyed the color of cheap mahogany, recruits a band of absolute losers to pull off the job. There is a safecracker with Parkinson's whose hands only shake when he is not committing a crime, a heavy-set demolitions expert who is constantly eating, and an alcoholic ex-military man who speaks entirely in English profanity. Abhishek Bachchan plays Nandu, a tapori who pukes whenever he gets nervous, and the gag repeats four times too many before the first song break. They all need to learn how to dance to get into the Atlantis hotel where the diamonds are kept. This brings in Deepika Padukone as Mohini, a bar dancer with a terrible Maharashtrian accent who runs a dance school called Dream Girls that smells like old gym socks.

Farah Khan directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer falling through a skylight. Every single scene is lit as though it is trying to win an award for maximum wattage, and the camera never stays still for more than three seconds, whipping around actors' heads whether they are delivering a plot point or just standing there waiting for their cue. The screenplay by Althea Delmas, Rajat Arora, and Farah herself lurches from crude bathroom humor to high-gloss melodrama without ever finding a gear that feels human. It is a loud movie. The sound design is particularly aggressive, dropping heavy sub-bass thumps whenever Abhishek Bachchan makes a stupid face, just in case you forgot you were supposed to laugh at his physical comedy. The editing by Rameshwar S. Bhagat chops scenes up so frantically that spatial awareness completely dissolves, leaving you stranded in a succession of flashy rooms where nobody seems to be standing next to anybody else.

Abhishek Bachchan does most of the heavy lifting in the comedy department and somehow survives the material. He plays Nandu with a wide-eyed, desperate energy that makes you forget how annoying the character actually is on paper. Deepika Padukone looks stunning in every single frame, draped in emeralds and silks that probably cost more than my car, but she spends half her screen time playing the butt of jokes about her English pronunciation. It feels mean-spirited in a way that modern hindi films usually try to avoid, even when they are leaning hard into broad slapstick. Shah Rukh Khan, meanwhile, plays Charlie with the autopilot firmly engaged. He has three modes here: brooding in front of a mirror, shouting slogans about revenge, and smiling indulgently while Deepika dances in a crop top. Boman Irani pops up as a stuttering Parsi hacker who has mommy issues, chewing the scenery with such ferocity that you half expect him to bite the lenses right out of the cameras.

The music by Vishal-Shekhar dominates the second half of the runtime like an unwanted guest who refuses to leave the couch. India has produced some incredible soundtracks over the decades, and while some of these tracks became massive club hits, they drag the narrative to a complete halt every twenty minutes. The dance sequences are less about movement and more about how many backup dancers can fit on a hydraulic platform without breaking the budget. Manisha Sharma's costume design deserves some sort of hazard pay, particularly for the bizarre leather-and-mesh outfits the crew wears during the final dance-off against a Korean team that looks like they wandered off the set of a bad sci-fi B-movie. Cinematographer K. Ravi Chandran shoots Dubai like a real estate brochure that has been dipped in bleach. It is all glass, steel, and golden hour sunlight, completely devoid of texture or grit.

What keeps the whole enterprise from completely dissolving is a weird sort of aggressive sincerity. Even when the jokes fall flat and the green-screen work looks like it was outsourced to a high schooler with cracked software, the cast is selling it with terrifying commitment. They are not winking at the audience. They genuinely want you to believe that a bunch of incompetent misfits can waltz into a heavily guarded vault while doing hip-hop routines to a backing track composed by an uncredited DJ. It is a throwback to an older, sillier style of commercial cinema where logic was just a suggestion that could be safely ignored if a good beat dropped. Bollywood movies have always loved a good redemption arc, and watching these broken people find their groove is mildly charming right up until the point where Boman Irani makes another joke about his mother's underwear.

There is a specific supporting actor in the crew—Vivian Bhatena as the sneering antagonist Mohandas Grover—who is clearly dubbed by someone else, and the sync is off by a full syllable in almost every single close-up. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time he opened his mouth to threaten the safety of the world's most heavily guarded emeralds. You start watching the lips instead of the plot. By the time the climax arrives with its slow-motion leaps and preposterous security breaches, the movie has simply worn you down. It is not trying to be clever. It is just a massive, noisy machine designed to separate families from their holiday weekend popcorn money while keeping the air conditioning running in multiplexes across the country. I didn't hate it, but I forgot most of it before I even reached the parking garage.