Salman Khan playing a dwarf in New York City is not something you shake off easily once the projector bulb flickers to life, especially when he is wearing a silver puffer jacket that looks like it came from a discounted sci-fi wardrobe bin, strutting around Times Square while singing about his broken heart to a group of confused tourists who probably thought they were extras in a totally different movie.

Shirish Kunder decided that his directorial debut needed to look like a music video that had consumed too many energy drinks and stayed up for three days straight, dumping every single visual trick known to digital cinematography onto the screen all at once, which makes watching Jaan-e-Mann an exercise in sheer endurance if you happen to be sitting too close to the front row. The colors are so saturated they practically bleed onto your popcorn, and the camera never stays still for more than three seconds, swooping crane shots giving way to dizzying whip pans that make you wonder if the operator had a train to catch. There is an audacity to the artifice here because nothing looks real, from the New York streets constructed on a soundstage with artificial snow that stubbornly refuses to melt under the studio lights, to the ridiculous apartment that Salman's character Agastya shares with Anupam Kher's eccentric uncle figure who speaks in loud theatrical asides that belong in a bad farce from the nineteen-eighties rather than a modern romantic triangle.

Preity Zinta enters this digital fever dream looking like she stepped out of a glossy magazine spread, playing Piya with a kind of high-gloss perfection that leaves very little room for actual human messiness, though she does have this one specific eye roll whenever Akshay Kumar's character starts quoting Shakespeare that feels entirely genuine and lived-in. Akshay plays Suhaan, an aspiring director whose career has tanked so hard he is reduced to choreographing weird stage numbers with dancing lobsters, and he attacks this role with a frantic, sweating energy that recalls his earlier days in mindless comedies before he decided to become the patriotic conscience of the nation in every other project on his resume. He is doing the heavy lifting of the narrative, trying to convince us that a man would actually hire his ex-wife's new suitor to seduce her back so he can collect alimony without feeling like a complete monster, which is a premise so convoluted and morally bankrupt that even classic Hindi movies from the golden era would have rejected it as too far-fetched for a Saturday afternoon crowd.

The songs by Anu Malik arrive every ten minutes like clockwork, and while the title track has a soaring, melancholic sweep that lingers in the lobby long after the house lights come up, the background score is an absolute disaster that never shuts up for even a single beat, constantly telling the audience how to feel with thumping basslines and weeping violins that step all over the actors' dialogue. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound effects editor decided that every time Salman's character walks, his prosthetic hump needs to squeak like a cheap leather shoe, an auditory detail that completely ruins the pathos of his tragic backstory about being a disgraced NASA scientist reduced to street performing. You can see the seams of the production in almost every frame, from the dodgy green screen work out the window of Agastya's penthouse to the way Anupam Kher's wig shifts slightly whenever he raises an eyebrow in mock surprise.

Kunder was editing his own movie and you can feel the absence of someone standing behind him with a pair of scissors shouting about pacing, because scenes linger for minutes past their expiration date just so we can admire another digital set extension or another slow-motion hair flip from Preity. Bollywood movies have always loved grand, impossible romantic gestures, but there is a distinct difference between the sweeping melodrama of a Sanjay Leela Bhansali picture and the neon-soaked plastic nonsense on display here, where every emotion feels like it has been filtered through five layers of post-production software before reaching the viewer. Even the snow falling on the streets of Manhattan has that distinct sparkly look of artificial confetti dropped from a catwalk, completely failing to convince anyone who has ever spent five minutes in an actual northeastern winter.

Yet despite the relentless artificiality of the enterprise, there is a weird, lopsided charm to the central dynamic between the two male leads, who spend a good chunk of the runtime plotting against each other in a series of increasingly elaborate schemes that owe more to cartoon physics than romantic comedy conventions. Salman is playing the nice guy with a hidden pain, a role he can do in his sleep, but he brings a certain weary sweetness to the dwarf prosthesis that prevents the character from becoming an entirely offensive caricature, while Akshay goes broad and manic, chewing the scenery with a manic grin that suggests he knew exactly what kind of chaotic project he had signed up for. They share a chemistry that transcends the mechanical plotting of the script, playing off each other with a timing that feels genuinely improvisational in scenes where they are supposed to be bitter rivals competing for the same woman.

The narrative structure collapses entirely in the second half when the film decides to abandon the breezy comedy of errors in New York and shift into a heavy-handed emotional melodrama back in India, complete with crying relatives, lingering train station farewells, and a musical climax that goes on for a full twenty minutes without adding anything new to the emotional resolution. It is the kind of picture where characters make decisions that defy basic common sense simply because the plot demands a specific confrontation, like when Piya refuses to listen to a two-minute explanation that would clear up the entire misunderstanding about why her ex-husband is suddenly playing matchmaker with her new fiancé. You sit there in the dark waiting for someone to just use a telephone or tell the truth, but the genre rules forbid it, forcing everyone to suffer through unnecessary musical numbers and tearful monologues under heavily lit studio moonlight.

Looking at the broader landscape of Hindi cinema from that decade, Jaan-e-Mann occupies a strange middle ground between the traditional multi-starrer romances of the nineties and the slick, multiplex-friendly comedies that would soon take over the box office, ultimately failing to satisfy either crowd because it tries to be a cartoon and a tragedy at the exact same time. The visual effects have aged terribly, looking more like an early prototype for a video game cutscene than high-end studio filmmaking, and the pacing drags terribly in the middle section when the songs start piling up on top of each other with no narrative justification. Still, there is something endearing about a movie that swings for the fences with such total disregard for good taste or narrative logic, even if it leaves you rubbing your eyes and reaching for an aspirin by the time the credits finally roll over a blooper reel that shows the actors laughing through their heavy makeup.

Anupam Kher drops his false teeth in one scene for a cheap laugh that falls completely flat, and honestly, that moment sums up a lot of the runtime, which relies on broad physical gags that were stale back when Charlie Chaplin was still making two-reelers. The supporting cast floats in and out of the narrative without leaving much of an impression, serving mostly as human furniture to fill up the impossibly large, brightly colored rooms that Kunder loves to frame with wide-angle lenses. If I am being completely honest, the most memorable thing about the whole experience is the sheer nerve of the production design, which manages to make a city as iconic as New York look like a miniature model built by an enthusiastic teenager in a basement with too much time and a very limited budget.

When the final reel stumbles toward its inevitable conclusion, with everyone paired off neatly despite the emotional wreckage they have caused each other along the way, you do not feel the catharsis that a proper romantic drama is supposed to deliver, just a quiet sense of relief that the sensory assault is finally over. The songs remain catchy, the stars look movie-star gorgeous even when they are weeping into artificial snow, and the direction displays a breathless, amateurish enthusiasm that refuses to be ignored, making it a fascinating artifact of a very specific, hyper-stylized era in commercial filmmaking that we are unlikely to ever see repeated on quite this scale.