Varun Dhawan's shoulder gear stays inexplicably unbuttoned through four consecutive dramatic confrontations, and if I'm honest, that wardrobe choice annoyed me more than any plotting shortcut Shashank Khaitan took in the second half. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, especially when the camera keeps lingering on his collarbone as if we are supposed to be reading some deep emotional subtext from a stray bit of chest hair. We are not. We are just watching a very pretty, very loud romantic comedy trying to coast on the residual charm of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge without earning a single one of its own narrative beats.

Khaitan directs with the visual flair of a wedding videographer who just discovered color grading and wide-angle lenses. The screenplay borrows wholesale from the thirty-year playbook of standard Hindi films, dragging us through the familiar mechanics of small-town ambition, patriarchal resistance, and an impending arranged marriage to a suspiciously decent human being. Siddharth Shukla plays that third-wheel fiancé, Angad, with such stiff, agonizingly polite dignity that you spend most of the runtime actively rooting for the boring, stable doctor over the sweating, hyperactive protagonist. That is a massive structural problem for a romantic comedy, because when the designated villain is merely a sensible professional who treats his fiancée with basic human respect, the central conflict curdles into an exercise in pure irritation.

Alia Bhatt saves large portions of this movie simply by narrowing her eyes and refusing to play the standard-issue bubbly heroine. She has this way of pitching her voice just low enough in a confrontational scene that the other actors have to stop chewing the scenery and actually listen to her. When she drags Humpty across the coals for his lack of ambition, you see a real person trapped inside a cartoonish script, fighting against the gravitational pull of a genre that demands she swoon for the first guy who yells at her in a public square. Dhawan, conversely, plays every emotional beat at maximum volume, sweating through pastel shirts and doing his best Salman Khan impersonation until the charm wears thin and turns into exhaustion. He has a kinetic presence that works fine in short bursts, but the script asks him to carry scenes of genuine heartbreak with the same goofy grin he uses for introductory dance numbers.

The soundtrack relies heavily on that one catchy track played at every single Delhi reception, looping through background cues so often that you start hearing it in your sleep long after the credits cut to black. Cinematographer Neha Parti Mati shoots Ambala and Delhi with plenty of saturated primary colors and sun-drenched rooftops, though the lighting choices occasionally shift from scene to scene with no logical continuity. A conversation in a market will be bathed in golden hour haze, and then the reverse shot will look like it was filmed under fluorescent tubes in a basement, which happens more often in modern commercial cinema than anyone cares to admit.

Underneath all the designer lehengas and choreographed sangeet sequences, there is a weirdly conservative anxiety about class mobility and female desire that keeps bubbling to the surface. Kavya wants designer shoes and a wealthy husband, but the film insists on punishing her for those surface-level material wants by making her fall for a broke, underachieving broker who can barely pay his phone bill. It is a very old-school dynamic that runs through plenty of Bollywood releases, where financial ambition in women is treated as a temporary moral failing that needs to be cured by the love of a good, useless man. Ashutosh Rana plays the stern, barking patriarch with the exact same growl he has been using since Dushman, delivering monologues about family honor while looking thoroughly bored by the material.

Khaitan tries to inject some modern sass into the proceedings with dialogue that references Facebook updates and branded shoes, but the pacing suffers whenever the narrative has to stop for a song that does nothing to advance the emotional stakes. By the time the mandatory airport-run finale rolls around—because no mid-budget romantic comedy in this industry is legally allowed to end without someone sprinting past security—the exhaustion has set in so completely that even the bright costumes cannot save the frame. It is a movie that functions entirely on autopilot, throwing familiar tropes at the screen until something sticks, leaving you with nothing to hold onto except the memory of Bhatt’s precise, exasperated sighs.