There is a specific sound a prop glass makes when it is slammed down onto a fake marble table in a mid-budget comedy from the middle of the last decade, a hollow, echoing clatter that tells you instantly no one cared about the room acoustics during the dialogue dubbing. Kuch Kuch Locha Hai begins with that exact acoustic failure, a tinny reverberation that sets the teeth on edge before a single character has managed to state their primary motivation. It is a small thing, but it bugged me from the very first frame, establishing a baseline of technical carelessness that the rest of the ninety-odd running time works exceptionally hard to maintain.

Director Devang Dholakia approaches the material with the visual flair of a local cable access station trying to shoot a high-end commercial on a borrowed DSLR with a dirty lens. The camera rarely sits still, constantly panning across sets that look like they were constructed out of leftover plywood from a neighborhood hardware store, and whenever the action threatens to slow down for even a fraction of a second, the editor shoves in a random zoom shot like someone just discovered the primary feature of their editing software and refused to let it go. Characters walk into rooms that have no geographical relationship to the hallways they just left, sunlight streams horizontally across interiors that are supposedly set deep in the basement of a corporate office, and the background extras look perpetually confused about whether they are supposed to be eating their fake pastries or staring directly into the lens. It is hard to find a rhythm when every single cut feels like a panicked response to a botched take, leaving scenes stranded in a no-man's-land between farce and disaster.

Ram Kapoor plays a wealthy, middle-aged Gujarati businessman who has apparently spent his entire life studying the mannerisms of cartoon characters played by actors who were severely concussed. He hams it up with an exhausting, relentless energy, puffing out his cheeks, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling whenever someone mentions marriage or money, and delivering lines about as subtly as a brick through a stained-glass window. He is trying so hard to channel the chaotic energy of Govinda in Deewana Mastana that you can practically see the sweat beading up on his forehead under the hot studio lights, but the timing is always a beat off, leaving punchlines hanging in the empty air like abandoned laundry. Beside him, Sunny Leone plays a movie star named Shanaya, and while she is ostensibly the main attraction for the demographic buying tickets to this particular brand of Hindi cinema, her performance consists primarily of standing very still in tightly wound dresses and blinking slowly at the camera as if trying to remember if she left the stove on back home. Navdeep Chhabra tries to anchor the romantic subplot with the kind of wide-eyed, earnest confusion that usually belongs in a high school play, but he mostly just looks lost, wandering through the frames like a tourist who accidentally boarded the wrong bus and is too polite to ask the driver where they are going.

The soundtrack is a relentless assault of generic club beats that seem to have been purchased in bulk from an online royalty-free library and slapped onto whatever sequence was currently lacking momentum. Songs appear out of nowhere without any narrative justification, dragging the already sluggish plot to a complete halt while backup dancers perform aggressively complicated choreography in front of painted backdrops that shimmer under the harsh lighting. Evelyn Sharma pops up in a supporting role that requires her to smile brightly and say lines that sound like they were translated from another language using an early version of online translation software, and she does her best with them, though her dubbing is so aggressively out of sync with her mouth movements that you could read a novel between the consonants.

There is an underlying morality to these kinds of Bollywood movies that usually involves a complicated dance between traditional family values and modern urban desires, but here that tension is treated with all the philosophical depth of a cereal box. The script lurches from one contrived misunderstanding to the next without bothering to establish why any of these people care about each other, let alone why we should care about their romantic entanglements. Jokes about infidelity and aging are recycled from television sitcoms that were already stale twenty years ago, and characters change their personalities from scene to scene depending entirely on what the next setup requires them to do.

Suchita Trivedi does what she can with a thankless role as the nagging wife, delivering her dialogue with a sharp, piercing pitch that cuts right through the muddy sound design, but the film has no interest in her character beyond serving as a human obstacle for Kapoor to trick. When the credits finally roll, bringing an end to the visual and auditory barrage, there is no sense of catharsis, just a dull ringing in the ears and the profound realization that two hours of your life have evaporated into absolute nothingness.