That scene where R. Madhavan's character whispers his photography dreams into a dictaphone always gets played at weddings now, which is annoying because it completely strips away the actual desperation of the kid recording it. I'm honestly sick of hearing that specific bit of voiceover whenever somebody posts an anniversary reel on Instagram. Rajkumar Hirani directs these massive Hindi movies like he's terrified somebody in the cheap seats is checking their phone, which means every emotional beat gets hammered twice just to be safe. You get the loud crying, then you get the lingering close-up of the tear running down the cheek, then you get the flute cue reminding you to feel sad about it. It’s a very noisy way to tell a story about finding your own path, and if I'm being real, it wears you down after two and a half hours of relentless lecturing.

Aamir Khan plays Rancho with this terrifying, perpetually amused grin that makes him look less like an engineering student and more like an aggressive cult leader who has read slightly too much self-help literature. He's forty-something playing nineteen and your eyes just have to accept it because he runs around the campus courtyard with his backpack slung over one shoulder like he's dodging a warrant. His performance relies entirely on that head-tilt he does when he's about to deliver a smug lecture about passion versus success. Sharman Joshi fares much better as Raju, sweating through every single frame with a twitchy, frantic energy that feels earned. He carries the panic of a lower-middle-class household on his shoulders without turning into a pure cartoon, even when the script forces him to dangle from a second-story balcony. Then there is Boman Irani barking away as Professor Viru Sahastrabuddhe, a man whose entire character motivation seems to be an obsessive hatred of ballpoint pens and left-handed people. Irani doesn't play a human being so much as he plays a walking air-raid siren with a handlebar mustache, screaming about excellence while holding a mechanical pencil that looks like a medieval torture device.

The screenplay, adapted loosely from Chetan Bhagat's airport-novel pulp, bounces back and forth across a decade-long mystery that nobody over the age of eight actually cares about solving. Where is Rancho? Why won't he talk to his old college buddies? Who cares, honestly, because every time the narrative jumps back to the present day, we have to endure more terrible old-age makeup that makes Kareena Kapoor look like she was dragged backward through a frosted cornflake factory. Kapoor is mostly here to look concerned, ride a moped while wearing a lab coat, and occasionally show up at weddings to remind Rancho that she exists outside of his engineering textbooks. The camera work by C.K. Muraleedharan does what it can with concrete corridors and primary-color classrooms, but everything is lit so brightly that it frequently resembles a detergent commercial directed by an anxious bureaucrat. Shantanu Moitra's soundtrack arrives every ten minutes to tell you exactly how to feel, pounding those acoustic guitars until your skull aches, though the main marching-band track does admittedly lodge itself in your brain for days.

There's a weirdly conservative undercurrent running through this whole critique of the Indian education system, mostly because the movie keeps insisting that you shouldn't just study hard, you should also invent a motorized scooter that runs on vegetable oil or deliver a baby on a ping-pong table using a vacuum cleaner. It wants to dismantle the rat race while simultaneously rewarding its heroes with massive venture capital funding and private helicopter rides. It's the kind of populist moralizing that reminds me of Darsheel Safareey trying to paint through his dyslexia in Taare Zameen Par, except here the stakes involve high-end corporate engineering jobs and multi-million-dollar patents instead of finger paints. Education isn't about rote learning, the movie yells at you for two hundred minutes, unless your frantic nocturnal tinkering happens to produce a billion-dollar gadget that saves the college director's pregnant daughter from dying in a thunderstorm.

That sequence with the delivery on the pool table is where the whole enterprise completely flies off the rails into sheer, unadulterated nonsense. Kareena Kapoor is shouting instructions while Mona Singh directs traffic through a web-cam and Aamir Khan builds a makeshift vacuum extractor out of a vacuum cleaner hose and a desk lamp. It is shot with the breathless panic of an action set-piece, complete with fast cuts and swelling strings, except they are dealing with a breached placenta in the middle of a torrential downpour while the entire student body watches on a live-feed monitor. It's a small thing in the grand scheme of Bollywood tropes, but the lighting in that specific hallway keeps changing from warm amber to harsh fluorescent between cuts, which totally pulls you out of the fake medical emergency. Nobody in the audience cares about continuity errors when a baby is being born via vacuum cleaner, but it's sloppy work from a director who usually keeps his massive productions locked down tighter than an IIT admissions exam.

The film ends on a desolate beach in Ladakh where Rancho runs a progressive school for children who wear handmade sweaters and finger-paint without being graded on their technique. He owns a gorgeous clifftop house with panoramic windows, proving once and for all that if you just follow your passion and ignore the syllabus, you too can become a wealthy eccentric with a drone photography business and a fleet of yellow Vespas. It doesn't really land as a critique of anything concrete because the alternative it offers is just another flavor of upper-class fantasy where nobody ever has to worry about rent or health insurance. Madhavan gets his wildlife photography gig, Joshi gets a corporate corner office with a view of Mumbai traffic, and Kapoor arrives on her scooter to share a sunset kiss while the drums kick in for one last reprise. The last frame fades to black on a joke involving urination and a fountain pen, which feels about right for a movie that spends three hours trying to make you weep and laugh in equal, exhausting measure.