Sunil Shetty wears a mustard yellow blazer about forty minutes into Mere Dost Picture Abhi Baki Hai that deserves its own billing in the opening credits, or at least a brief moment of silence from the wardrobe department. Hindi films have long had a complicated relationship with tailoring, mostly because tailoring implies a budget for something other than imported stretch denim and sunglasses worn indoors during night shoots, but this particular jacket has a life of its own that completely ignores whatever the character is trying to say. If I'm honest, I spent more time wondering how many dry-cleaning bills that specific piece of fabric accumulated during production than I did pondering the existential dread of the protagonist. You can usually tell when a movie is running on fumes and leftover catering budget simply by the frequency of costume repeats in crowd scenes, but here the lead actor is walking around looking like a disgruntled mustard bottle while the plot tries to tackle the deeply serious business of getting a motion picture made in a notoriously cutthroat industry.

Director Jhabbar Patel takes the basic premise of a struggling writer-director trying to hustle financiers and somehow turns it into an episodic farce that constantly loses its footing whenever someone opens their mouth to deliver a punchline that died of old age back during the Govinda nineties. The screenplay by whoever happened to be sitting near the water cooler that afternoon relies heavily on people shouting at each other in crowded Mumbai offices while the camera zooms in with the subtle grace of a sledgehammer hitting a hollow brick. You get the distinct impression that nobody on set bothered to yell cut because they were all trying to catch their flights out of Film City before the traffic on the Western Express Highway locked down completely. Rajpal Yadav is running around the periphery doing his usual frantic thing, sweating profusely and clutching loose leaf paper as if those pages contain the secret formula to nuclear fission rather than a half-baked script about revenge and romance, and yet his frantic energy occasionally lifts the dead air just enough to stop you from checking your watch.

Om Puri wanders through this mess with the glazed, bewildered expression of a man who accidentally walked onto the wrong soundstage while looking for the washroom, which makes his performance weirdly compelling against the relentless noise around him. Neena Gupta tries to anchor the domestic scenes with actual human dignity, providing a sharp contrast to the broadly caricatured villains played by Shahwar Ali and Deepak Shirke who seem to think they are starring in a completely different movie shot in a damp warehouse in 1994. Shayan Munshi and Udita Goswami fill out the romantic corners of the canvas without leaving much of a smudge on the glass, largely because their scenes feel like they were edited together in a dark room by someone who had never met them and didn't particularly care to start now. Mumait Khan shows up for an item number that arrives out of nowhere with the narrative justification of a falling coconut, vibrating through choreography that owes a heavy debt to every other forgettable mid-tier dance track floating around the fringes of contemporary cinema.

The cinematography by Johny Lal looks like it was lit using whatever fluorescent tubes happened to be left burning overhead after the daytime soap opera wrapped up its shift in the adjacent studio. Every frame is bathed in that flat, unyielding television glare that flattens out human skin tones and turns every interior into a waiting room at a municipal tax office. Then there is the sound design, which relies on a recurring synthesized chime every time a character realizes something obvious, a repetitive little auditory tick that starts off mildly annoying and escalates into a form of low-level psychological torture by the time the intermission finally grants a merciful pause. You watch these veteran actors struggle against the relentless tide of poor dubbing where the dialogue tracks sound like they were recorded inside a galvanized steel water tank using an old dictaphone, and you wonder how much anyone actually cared about the finished product once the checks cleared from the financiers.

Bollywood movies have a long and storied tradition of making fun of themselves through metatextual comedies about the absurdity of filmmaking, stretching all the way back to classics like Rang Birangi and the more recent frantic energy of something like Luck by Chance, but this film misses the satirical target by about three miles and hits an innocent bystander instead. It treats the struggle of the common artist with the sort of cynical detachment usually reserved for late-night infomercials selling rust remover, stripping away any actual satirical bite and replacing it with cheap gags involving mistaken identity and falling scaffolding. The thematic spine of the piece is supposed to be about the resilience of dreamers who refuse to let the corporate sharks crush their artistic spirit, but whenever the story threatens to touch on genuine emotion, the director cuts immediately to a poorly timed visual gag involving a fat man getting hit in the groin with a rubber chicken or a stray dog wandering onto the set.

It is a small thing, but it bugged me throughout the second half: the boom mic dips into the upper corner of the frame not just once during a dramatic monologue about lost honor, but three separate times in the exact same apartment set, as if the entire crew had simply given up looking at the monitor and gone out for tea. That kind of basic technical carelessness drains the last drop of goodwill out of an already exhausting viewing experience, leaving you stranded with actors who are shouting their lines at maximum volume just to keep pace with an editing rhythm that makes every scene feel ten minutes longer than it actually is. By the time the closing credits finally stutter onto the screen over a bizarrely upbeat bhangra remix that has nothing whatsoever to do with the preceding two hours, you aren't angry or disappointed so much as genuinely baffled that anyone looked at the final assembly and said yes, print it.