There is a specific kind of low-frequency whine that emits from the sound design whenever Chunky Pandey appears on screen in "Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum" and if I'm honest it drove me slightly mad by the forty-minute mark. It is a cartoonish slide-whistle effect applied to his posture, which is already curved like a question mark and working overtime to sell dialogue written with the structural integrity of a collapsed soufflé. We are deep inside the machinery of modern Hindi cinema here, or at least the sweaty, desperate basement where the franchises go to die and then somehow make ninety crores anyway. Sachin Yardi took over the directing chair from Tony D'Souza this time around and promptly decided that subtlety was a personal insult. Every single scene is lit as though the grip forgot to take the welding mask off, casting this glaring, soap-opera sheen over actors who look like they received their character motivations via a hurried text message sent from the vanity van.

Riteish Deshmukh and Tusshar Kapoor return as the dynamic duo of eternal horndogs Adi and Sid, living in a Mumbai apartment that defies all known laws of real estate and basic interior design logic. They spend the first twenty minutes arguing about pug breeding and debt collection with a manic energy that suggests someone spiked the craft services table with industrial solvents. Deshmukh has always possessed a genuinely quick comic timing that can rescue even the most aggressively juvenile script, which he proves here during a long sequence involving a fake funeral and a misplaced urn. Kapoor, conversely, has settled into a permanent state of bewildered vocal fry, playing the straight man with his eyebrows permanently hitched up toward his hairline like he is trying to remember if he turned the gas off at home.

The plot if we are forced to dignify it with that noun involves mistaken identities, Goa resorts, and a frantic search for lost money that keeps getting interrupted by extended musical numbers shot against beaches that look remarkably like they were rented by the hour. Bipasha Basu and Neha Sharma show up looking entirely bewildered as the love interests, drifting through frames filled with pastel-colored cabanas and backup dancers who are clearly questioning their life choices. Angela Jonsson and Sarah Jane Dias pop in too, mostly to wear swimwear and react with mild annoyance to the ceaseless barrage of double entendres that fly past the camera with the velocity of wet paper towels. It is loud, it is broad, and it operates on the exhausting assumption that if you yell a bad sex joke three times in a row it somehow transforms into a brilliant satire of contemporary masculinity.

There is a weirdly defensive quality to the writing in these movies, a sort of preemptive cringe that acknowledges how deeply silly the entire enterprise is while diving headfirst into the swamp anyway. You can feel the screenwriters desperately trying to recapture the anarchic, anything-goes energy of "Masti" without any of the actual comic architecture that made that earlier film occasionally work. Instead, we get endless reaction shots of supporting actors pulling rubbery faces that linger a full two beats longer than necessary, telegraphing the punchline before the characters have even finished mispronouncing the foreign words. The soundtrack by Sachin-Jigar recycles the same three electronic bass drops until your teeth start vibrating in time with the kick drum. It makes you yearn for the relative sophistication of a David Dhawan picture from the nineties, which at least had the decency to move fast enough that you could forget the plot holes while you were watching them.

Nobody goes to see these things expecting a thesis on modern urban alienation, obviously, but the laziness on display here feels almost impressive in its scope. The color grading changes from scene to scene with no discernible logic, jumping from a bleached-out daylight look to an aggressive neon saturation that makes everyone look like they have been dipped in orange squash. It's a small thing but it bugged me how the boom mic dips into the upper corner of the frame during a crucial confrontation on a yacht, just hanging there for a solid ten seconds while Tusshar Kapoor delivers a monologue about canine loyalty. The actors do what they can with material that feels like it was scraped off the floor of a second-rate sketch comedy writers' room, but the sheer volume of the enterprise flattens out every performance until everyone blends into a single beige blob of noise. By the time the credits mercifully crawl across the screen, you are left with nothing except a low-grade headache and a profound respect for anyone who managed to stay awake through the second act.