The sound design on the wedding band entrance in the first twenty minutes of Mubarakaan is about three decibels too loud for what the center channel can handle, which means every time the dhol kicks in, the dialogue gets slightly fuzzy around the edges. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time those drums came back, and they come back constantly.

Director Anees Bazmee has spent the better part of a few decades figuring out how to stretch a single mistaken-identity premise across two and a half hours without completely losing the room, and here he relies on a rhythm that feels almost aggressively old-school, recalling the frantic, door-slamming energy of comedies like No Entry without quite capturing that particular film's weird, neon-lit grit. The screenplay by Balwinder Singh Surjanwala and Rupinder Chahal is essentially a relay race of misunderstandings where two twin brothers, separated at birth and raised in radically different environments, end up in London navigating an arranged marriage plot that neither of them actually wants, but the machinery of the plot is so loud that you barely notice how thin the narrative connective tissue is.

Arjun Kapoor plays both Karan and Charan, and if I'm honest, he does a much better job separating the two than anyone had any right to expect given his previous work in double-role territory, though he still tends to lean back on a slightly glazed expression whenever the dialogue stops for more than three seconds. Karan is aggressive, slick, and wears suits that look like they cost more than my first car, while Charan is soft-spoken, wears a turban with meticulous care, and looks perpetually terrified of disappointing his elders. The physical comedy relies heavily on them standing next to each other through the magic of split-screen photography, which has gotten cleaner since the days of Judwaa, but the seams still show whenever they need to pass an object between frames.

Then there is Anil Kapoor playing Kartar Singh, a man who acts as the family fixer, marriage counselor, and general chaos engine, tearing through every scene with the manic, terrifying energy of an uncle who drank three espressos before a family dinner and has decided to solve everyone's life problems whether they asked him to or not. He makes the entire contraption tick. Without his ability to deliver absolute nonsense with the conviction of a Shakespearean actor, the movie would just be a series of people shouting in opulent living rooms about property disputes in Punjab and London. Ileana D'Cruz and Athiya Shetty show up as the romantic interests, though their primary function is to look exasperated while the men scream at each other in hallways, which feels like a waste of their respective screen time in what is ostensibly a mainstream Hindi film.

The cinematography by Himman Dhamija opts for a high-key, sun-drenched look that makes even the dreary London streets look like they were shot during a perpetual tourist board commercial for NRI wealth, while the soundtrack by Amaal Mallik and Gourov-Roshin does the usual Bollywood movie heavy lifting of keeping the energy up during costume changes. The title track is catchy enough that you will find yourself humming it while brushing your teeth the next morning, which is probably the highest praise you can give a modern wedding song designed explicitly for sangeet playlists across North Delhi.

Underneath the slapstick and the convoluted lineage plots, the film is actually deeply invested in the peculiar tyranny of the joint family system, treating the extended clan not as a warm embrace but as an omnipresent tribunal that monitors your dating life, your religious devotion, and your bank statements from three continents away. This isn't handled with any particular subtlety—subtlety was left at the door when the second uncle pulled out a revolver in a garden party—but there is an honest exhaustion in how the younger characters try to navigate these ancient domestic expectations while wearing designer sunglasses.

The pacing in the second half drags considerably once the wedding party relocates to a sprawling estate where everyone has to hide in different closets to avoid being seen by the wrong set of parents, a farce trope that feels distinctly lifted from a 1980s stage play translated into Gujarati and then filmed with a massive budget. Yet every time the film threatens to grind to a complete halt, Anil Kapoor pops up behind a pillar with a fresh plot to gaslight a matriarch or convince a cynical lawyer that he is actually his own twin brother, and the momentum starts moving again through sheer force of will.

There is a specific kind of comfort to be found in Hindi movies that refuse to evolve past the grammar of a television sitcom, and Mubarakaan sits comfortably in that space without ever trying to reinvent the wheel or offer a trenchant social critique about modern romance. It’s too long by at least twenty minutes, the editing in the action-adjacent comedy sequences occasionally drops a crucial reaction shot, and the supporting cast of uncles and aunts blurs into a single mass of loud floral prints and raised eyebrows.

You leave the theater remembering the sound of Anil Kapoor shouting instructions across a crowded hotel lobby rather than any particular moral about family unity or the perils of arranged marriage, and honestly, that’s probably all the filmmakers were aiming for anyway.