Tusshar Kapoor delivers a line about a vibrating phone in the opening reel of Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3 that lands with the specific, echoing hollow of a joke told in an empty hallway where everybody already left five minutes ago. It's a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the film immediately expects everyone in the multiplex to treat this acoustic dead-zone as an invitation to three straight hours of unrelenting, bludgeoning vulgarity. Bollywood movies have rarely been accused of subtlety, but there is a profound difference between the enthusiastic, theatrical double-entendres of David Dhawan's peak nineties output and this joyless, algorithmic assembly of dirty jokes written by people who seem to have read about human desire exclusively in medical textbooks translated from ancient Greek. The plot, if one must dignify the structural scaffolding holding this debris together, revolves around adult film stars, mistaken identities, and a series of elaborate deceptions designed to trick a conservative family into accepting a pornographic production house operating out of a suburban bungalow.

Directorial duties are credited to Umesh Ghadge, though direction is a remarkably generous term for what appears to have been mostly shouting matches captured on medium shot while the boom mic intermittently drops into the top of the frame. The screenplay takes the exhausted premise of the first two installments and stretches it until the narrative joints pop. Scenes do not end so much as they simply dissolve into the next loud, poorly lit confrontation, populated by extras whose expressions suggest they are actively calculating how many hours remain on their shift. There is an unmistakable laziness to the blocking. Actors stand in straight lines across living room sets, delivering punchlines directly to the camera with the frantic energy of stand-up comics dying in front of a room full of people waiting for the buffet to open. Editing choices compound the misery. A reaction shot of Aftab Shivdasani blinking in confusion lingers four frames too long in nearly every sequence, dragging the comic timing down into the mud and ensuring that even the jokes that might have worked with a brisk rhythm die gasping on the cutting room floor.

Tusshar Kapoor has made a career out of playing the permanently bewildered sidekick, but anchoring a picture requires a gravity he simply does not possess, leaving the comedy to flatline whenever he is handed the dramatic heavy lifting of a scene. He drops his voice into a gravelly whisper whenever he is trying to look seductive, which happens with alarming frequency, and the effect is less James Bond and more a tired uncle trying too hard at a wedding reception. Aftab Shivdasani fares slightly better through sheer exhaustion, looking throughout as though he is mentally redecorating his apartment while someone yells about sex toys off-camera. Mandana Karimi spends most of her screen time walking in slow motion through fog machines, trapped in glamorous outfits that seem designed to punish her for signing a multi-film contract. Her Hindi dialogue is dubbed with such aggressive, out-of-sync precision that you can practically hear the sound engineer sweating in the booth, trying to match mouth flaps to syllables that were clearly recorded weeks later in an air-conditioned studio across town. The supporting cast features various veteran character actors who drift through the background looking like they accidentally wandered onto the wrong soundstage while searching for the canteen, occasionally dropping a line of dialogue that has been looped so many times it sounds like it is being broadcast from the bottom of an empty swimming pool.

Visually, the film resembles a particularly garish toothpaste commercial that has been left out in the sun too long. The color grading leans heavily into neon pinks and sickly greens that assault the retina long before the interval, turning every frame into a headache waiting to happen. The soundtrack relies on remixes of older tracks that pop up every twenty minutes to remind you of better afternoons spent watching television when you were ten years old. One particular saxophone hook repeats itself so often during romantic montages that it starts to sound like a threat. This relentless auditory assault is matched by cinematography that treats every interior space as an excuse to turn the ring light up to maximum brightness, washing out any texture the sets might have possessed and reducing the actors to glossy, oily cut-outs pasted against digital backdrops. Hindi cinema has occasionally produced visually striking erotic comedies that understand the power of shadow and suggestion, but this thing shoots every bedroom scene like a corporate training video for a bathroom fittings manufacturer.

The underlying ideology of these pictures has always been profoundly conservative despite the supposed naughtiness, operating on the ancient, dusty premise that female sexuality is simultaneously the most terrifying thing on earth and a punchline to be yelled by men in brightly colored shirts. Every female character is either a shrewish mother-in-law, a hyper-sexualized fantasy object, or an obstacle to be manipulated through elaborate lies. It is exhausting work trying to parse the logic of a script that spends half its runtime mocking traditional marriage values and the other half punishing anyone who deviates from them with forced weddings and moralizing speeches delivered over background sitars. Even Grand Masti managed to inject a strange, chaotic energy into its marital dissatisfaction, but this franchise has devolved into a dreary, punitive exercise that treats its audience like children who need to be shouted at until they stop crying. By the time the third act rolls around, involving a massive misunderstanding at a heritage hotel involving stolen dentures and a goat, the narrative has completely abandoned any pretense of coherence, collapsing into a heap of shouting actors and poorly executed slapstick that feels less like a narrative climax and more like an emergency evacuation.

If I'm honest, the whole enterprise feels less like a movie and more like a punishment devised by someone who really hates motion pictures. It lacks the campy charm of genuinely terrible cinema, sitting instead in that miserable middle zone where the budget is too high for accidental surrealism and the talent is too low for competence. The jokes are recycled from old internet forums that were stale during the Bush administration. The performances are phoned in from another time zone. The lighting makes everyone look like they have been dipped in lard. There is no joy in the naughtiness, no spark in the romance, and no rhythm to the comedy. It is just ninety minutes of loud noises, aggressive colors, and men shouting about genitalia while women stand around waiting for their close-ups. You leave the theater with a slight ringing in your ears and a profound sense of having wasted an afternoon that could have been spent sleeping on a park bench.