I cannot stop thinking about the sound of a plastic chair scraping across linoleum about twenty minutes into Santa Banta Pvt Ltd, which isn't even on screen, it’s just in the foley track under what is meant to be a tense interrogation scene in an upscale hotel room that looks like it was decorated by someone who won a gift card to a slightly upscale furniture warehouse in Noida and panicked.

Akashdeep Sabir directs this thing with the frantic energy of an uncle who drank three Red Bulls before trying to fix the Wi-Fi router during a family wedding while everyone is already yelling at each other about who parked behind whom in the driveway. The screenplay lurches from one half-baked set-piece to the next without bothering to establish geography, scale, or logic, preferring instead to throw Boman Irani and Vir Das into ill-fitting disguises and hope that the sheer volume of their shouting will distract you from the fact that the plot mechanism driving them through a ridiculous fictional version of Punjab is about as sturdy as a wet napkin left out in a monsoon downpour.

Boman Irani usually brings a certain gravitas to even the most questionable Bollywood ventures, but here he looks like he is trying to remember if he left the gas stove on back in Mumbai while simultaneously trying to deliver dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a 1998 sitcom script using an early version of AltaVista. He pairs up with Vir Das, whose comedic timing relies heavily on widening his eyes and talking really fast until someone yells cut, creating a weird dynamic where neither actor seems to inhabit the same physical reality or comedic universe.

Neha Dhupia and Lisa Haydon pop up in roles that require them to stand around looking glamorous while various male characters argue loudly over their heads, which feels less like acting and more like participation in an endurance test designed by people who watched Grand Masti and thought it lacked subtlety. Ram Kapoor growls his way through his scenes as the main antagonist, chewing scenery with such enthusiasm that you half expect him to start biting the actual wooden pillars of the set just to add some texture to an otherwise flavorless cinematic stew.

The cinematography looks like it was lit by someone whose primary experience is shooting local cable commercials for mattress stores, throwing flat, merciless light across every surface until all the shadows vanish and everything takes on the sickly hue of a dentist's waiting room on a Tuesday afternoon. Then there is the sound design, which frequently drops ambient noise entirely during conversations, leaving the actors' dialogue hanging in an unnatural, hollow vacuum that makes every forced punchline echo in your skull like a leaky faucet.

Hindi films have a long and storied tradition of slapstick farce that goes back decades, but somewhere along the line, the art of physical comedy got replaced by actors pulling funny faces while someone off-camera bangs on a cowbell to signal where the joke is supposed to land. The themes here, if you can even dignify them with that word, circle lazily around mistaken identity and the alleged hilarity of cross-dressing, dragging out tropes that smelled stale when Govinda was doing them in the nineties and now possess the advanced decomposition of roadkill left in the July sun.

There is a recurring musical cue that plays every single time Boman Irani puts on a fake mustache, and I swear to god it is the exact same four-note trombone blare used in every second-rate comedy sketch on television, repeating until your eye starts to twitch and you begin calculating how much time you have left on earth. It’s a small thing, really, just a sound effect, but it captures the absolute laziness of the enterprise, treating the audience like they need a flashing neon sign to understand when a joke is being attempted.

Hindi movies used to have a certain bounce to their nonsense, a loose-limbed charm that could rescue even the most dubious scripts from total collapse, but this project lacks even that basic baseline of competence, feeling more like an extended punishment for some unstated crime committed in a past life. The editing cuts away from reaction shots a half-beat too early, or lingers on them just long enough to make you deeply uncomfortable, destroying whatever meager comedic rhythm the performers managed to accidentally stumble into during a take.

If I'm honest, I've seen student short films shot on an old iPhone that had better visual continuity and more coherent spatial awareness than whatever is happening during the climax involving a stolen helicopter and a pile of remarkably unconvincing fake fruit. Vijay Raaz and Sanjay Mishra show up in supporting bits because bills must be paid and rent must be cleared, but even their reliable comic presence gets flattened by the relentless, grinding monotony of a script that thinks screaming a poorly written insult makes it funnier the third time.

The whole affair drifts toward its inevitable conclusion without ever finding a gear that feels like actual cinema, limping across the finish line like an injured dog that just wants someone to put it out of its misery and turn off the projector.