Boman Irani holds up an English primer in the third act of Dunki with an expression that suggests he is chewing a piece of corrugated cardboard, and if I am honest, that bit-part exasperation stays with you longer than the grand emotional payoffs Rajkumar Hirani spends two and a half hours setting up. Let's not pretend this is the director's finest hour, because the man who gave us 3 Idiots has clearly outsourced his comic timing to a focus group that believes older actors struggling with basic linguistics is a renewable resource.

We are dealing with the illegal immigration pipeline known colloquially as the donkey flight, and the script treats this desperate, border-hopping survival hustle with the tonal consistency of a Sunday morning sitcom that forgot to write jokes. Shah Rukh Khan plays Hardy, a man who looks back at his youth with that specific brand of digital de-aging that leaves his skin looking like polished linoleum under harsh studio lights. Taapsee Pannu and her crew of hopeful village migrants try to inject genuine desperation into the proceedings, but the narrative keeps dragging them back into broad comedy involving English language classes and chaotic interviews with frosty immigration officers who behave like cartoon villains from a 1990s VHS tape.

Vicky Kaushal walks away with the picture in a brief extended cameo as Sukhi, bringing a twitchy, terrifyingly raw edge of genuine tragedy to a movie that would otherwise prefer to sing songs about fields of mustard and enduring friendship. When Kaushal is on screen, the artificial sheen of the production design cracks wide open, revealing real stakes and genuine terror about being deported back to a life of quiet desperation. The rest of the ensemble cast, including Dharmendra and Satish Shah in smaller beats alongside Parikshit Sahni, rattle around the periphery like ghosts from an older era of Hindi movies where supporting players were given actual dialogue rather than reactions to shuffle along the plot. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often the editing room decided to linger on a reaction shot for two full seconds after the joke had already landed like a wet sack of flour.

Hirani directs with his usual broad strokes, painting every emotional shift in primary colors so even the people in the very back row of the theater know precisely when to dab at their eyes with a tissue. The cinematography opts for this aggressively warm, sun-bleached look that makes rural Punjab resemble a holiday brochure designed by someone who has never actually set foot outside an air-conditioned studio in Film City. When the characters finally make their perilous desert crossing through Iran and Europe, the sandstorms look suspiciously clean and the sun-baked lips of our heroes never quite manage to crust over properly. It lacks the grimy, lived-in desperation that made a movie like Saeed Akhtar Mirza's Mandi feel authentic, choosing instead to sanitize every single hardship until it looks suitable for family viewing during Diwali.

The music arrives with predictable regularity, dropping romantic ballads and upbeat travel tracks right when the narrative momentum needs to gather speed, forcing the actors to pause their illegal border crossings to execute synchronized choreography. Bollywood movies have always relied on musical interruptions to grease the wheels of plot progression, but here the songs feel like commercial breaks inserted into a story about human trafficking and deportation. You watch Hardy and his friends dance through snow-covered European alleys and you completely forget they are hiding from armed guards who have orders to shoot on sight.

There is an entire thematic argument buried under the slapstick about the cruel arbitrariness of borders and the way global capitalism feeds on the crushed aspirations of the global south. The film occasionally remembers this critique and tries to deliver a passionate monologue about how the earth belongs to everyone, but these moments arrive wrapped in such thick layers of melodrama that the political point gets completely swallowed by the sentimentality. When Hardy returns to his homeland decades later as an old man, the film expects us to weep for the passage of time, yet the makeup department has merely glued some silver hair to his temples and called it a day.

You leave the cinema wondering why a subject as brutal as the donkey route was handed to a filmmaker who treats every institutional failure as a cute misunderstanding that can be solved with a catchy song and a heartfelt speech about friendship. It is not great, not bad, just there, taking up space in the multiplex while better hindi films quietly pack up and leave the marquee after a single weekend.