Pulkit Samrat wears a leather jacket in this picture that looks like it cost more than the craft service budget for the entire second schedule. It has zippers on the forearms that serve no mechanical purpose whatsoever. They are just metal teeth sitting against dark sheepskin, catching the overhead light every time he crosses his arms to look brooding at a wedding buffet. I kept watching those zippers.

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari or someone with a very similar eye didn't direct this, which becomes obvious around minute forty when the camera starts orbiting a haldi ceremony with the frantic energy of a wasp trapped in a station wagon. The screenplay by whatever committee of four writers hatched the thing from a single logline found on a napkin treats plot like an inconvenience to be bypassed on the way to the next song cue. Characters enter frame without introduction, deliver exposition that sounds like it was translated from German and back via a budget smartphone app, and then vanish for forty minutes while Jimmy Sheirgill wanders through a series of increasingly cavernous living rooms looking like he'd rather be doing literally anything else. He has that specific look of a man who signed a three-film contract in 2011 and is just trying to clear his obligations before the tax laws change.

Kriti Kharbanda tries to hold the center of this debris field with a pair of oversized sunglasses and some genuinely committed eye-rolling, but the material keeps sliding away from her like melted ghee on a hot counter. When she has to do the big emotional pivot in the second half—you know the one, where the music swells with those synthetic strings that sound like a bee dying inside a cello—she drops her voice into an octave that suggests she is reading a terms-of-service agreement rather than confronting her estranged fiancé about his gambling debts. It is a strange sort of performance that isn't quite phoned in yet resolutely refuses to catch fire. Samrat is right there beside her doing his patented ninety-yard stare, a technique he probably picked up watching Salman Khan reruns in a Delhi hotel room, which involves narrowing his eyelids until his pupils disappear entirely behind a fringe of artificially grease-spiked hair. He doesn't act so much as he occupies space with mild annoyance.

The cinematography is lit with that flat, noon-day brightness common to modern Hindi films that prefer the look of an appliance showroom to anything resembling human skin tones. Every surface has been buffed until it reflects the key lights. Even the dirt on the tires of the imported SUVs looks like it was applied by a continuity supervisor with a sponge. The soundtrack uses the same four-note acoustic guitar motif every time someone looks wistfully out a car window at the New Delhi skyline, a city that here looks entirely composed of flyovers and blue glass office parks owned by telecom conglomerates. It's a small thing but it bugged me how the Foley artist decided that every time someone sets down a teacup on a glass table, it needs to make the exact acoustic ping of a bowling ball hitting a pin.

Underneath the wedding planning and the choreographed sangeet numbers that feature seventy background dancers who all look like they were plucked straight from an audition queue in Lokhandwala, there is a weak-kneed attempt to say something about modern marriage obligations versus traditional family pressure. Nobody involved seems to care about these ideas beyond using them as placeholders while the costume department brings out a new sherwani with gold thread work. The movie wants to be Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge for people who lease their sedans, but it lacks the structural grit that made even the flimsiest ninety-hundreds rom-coms feel lived-in. It feels like an algorithm was fed two dozen old Yash Raj scripts and told to spit out a version that could clear a satellite TV deal before the fiscal year closed.

By the time we reach the mandatory airport climax—and yes, there is an airport climax involving a customs barrier that would never pass basic security in Terminal 3—the actors have all adopted that glazed expression familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a four-hour wedding reception where the paneer was cold. It is not an offensive picture. It passes through the retina without leaving much behind except the faint metallic glint of those useless zippers on Pulkit Samrat's jacket.