There is a specific sound Bobby Deol makes in Yamla Pagla Deewana Phir Se when he is trying to look bewildered that I have not been able to get out of my head for three days, a sort of high-pitched whistling intake of breath that sounds less like an actor reacting to a script twist and more like a kettle starting to boil on a back burner. It happens around minute forty, right after a plot point involving a stolen recipe for an Ayurvedic cure-all that no one in the editing room seems particularly interested in tracking, and if I am honest, it set the exact tone for how I spent the rest of the runtime. Hindi films have always traded heavily on brand nostalgia, hauling out old patriarchs and dusty formulas to see if the box office still responds to the chime of a familiar grandfather clock, but this third installment in a franchise that probably should have been quietly put out to pasture after the first outing feels less like a continuation and more like an open-air garage sale where the family is selling off the last of the good china.

Punjab is rendered here through a lens of such aggressive, saturated green and yellow that you can practically smell the pesticide, a visual palette that owes more to a mid-range commercial for tractor parts than anything resembling cinematic geography. Director Navaniat Singh shoots the action sequences—and there are far too many of them, generally involving men being hurled through wooden tables while various traditional percussion instruments bang away on the soundtrack—with a frantic, zero-gravity disregard for momentum that leaves you entirely unmoored from whatever mild peril the characters are supposed to be facing. The screenplay, credited to Dheeraj Rattan, reads like a series of half-remembered sketches found in the back of a desk drawer after a writer was fired for drinking on the job, piling subplot upon subplot without ever bothering to establish why we should care about the mortgage on a failing chemist shop or the romantic life of a man who appears to be pushing fifty while still wearing graphic t-shirts that would look suspect on a college sophomore.

Dharmendra, playing an aging Ayurvedic practitioner who spends a good portion of his screen time winking at the camera and reciting Punjabi couplets that sound like they were pulled off a calendar, carries himself with the weary dignity of a man who knows he is just here to cash the check and keep a family production office afloat, which makes his sporadic flashes of genuine charm all the more irritating because they remind you of what he was capable of in films like Chupke Chupke before he got roped into this endless parade of self-parody. Sunny Deol remains trapped inside his own iconic persona like a bear in a very small cage, bellowing his dialogue with that familiar, vein-popping intensity that used to rattle multiplexes back in the nineties when Ghayal was cleaning up at the ticket counters, but here it just looks sad, a hollowed-out echo of aggressive masculinity rattling around a script that requires him to play the straight man to a bunch of gags about flatulence and mistaken identity.

Bobby is the real variable, drifting through the scenes with a kind of baffled resentment that occasionally threatens to become interesting before the director cuts to another painfully extended reaction shot of a local goon falling backward into a pile of cabbages. The supporting cast features a rotating collection of familiar television actors and aging character heavies who are clearly dubbed by someone working in a sound booth in Andheri with an entirely different microphone setup, resulting in dialogue tracks that float six inches above the actors' teeth like disgruntled ghosts. That particular audio glitch, where the room tone drops out entirely every time a villain opens his mouth to threaten the Deols, is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened, pulling me out of a movie that was already working overtime to keep me from caring.

The music, composed by a committee of people who apparently raided a royalty-free bhangra library on the internet, thumps away in the background with relentless cheerfulness, recycling old hooks from the earlier films in the series with such heavy-handed frequency that you start to feel like you are being punished for remembering the nineties. There is an entire musical number set inside what appears to be a very dusty warehouse that has been hastily decorated with some fairy lights and three plastic potted palms, and the dancers behind the leads look so profoundly bored that I found myself wondering if they were ever paid for the shoot or if they were just trapped there until craft services arrived with more tea.

Comedy in these kinds of mainstream Hindi movies has always relied on a certain amount of broad shouting, but there is a distinct difference between the chaotic, anarchic energy of classic farce and the leaden, calcified rhythm on display here, where every punchline is telegraphed five minutes in advance by a booming bass drop on the soundtrack. The thematic heart of the enterprise, if one can dignify a string of recycled gags with such a term, seems to be a desperate plea for family values and the preservation of traditional medicine, though these ideas are handled with all the subtlety of a falling anvil and are constantly interrupted by slapstick routines involving stray dogs and elderly women hitting each other with rolling pins.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its predictable conclusion involving a wedding and a massive, choreographed fistfight in a courtyard that looks suspiciously like every other courtyard built on the Film City backlot over the last thirty years, you realize that the film isn't actually interested in telling a story so much as it is maintaining a closed ecosystem where old stars can pretend the decades haven't eroded their box office dominance. It is an exhausting exercise in brand maintenance that lacks even the basic competence of a well-oiled B-picture, leaving behind nothing of substance once the projector clicks off and the lights come up in the auditorium.