Abhishek Bachchan’s introductory scene in Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya features a leather jacket that looks like it cost more than the craft services budget for the entire second half, and yet the man wearing it still manages to seem entirely unmoored from his own sleeves. It is a strange way to enter a picture, sliding into frame on a Yamaha motorcycle while the background extras pretend to browse plastic household goods with an urgency that suggests they are running from bees. If I'm honest, the whole opening twenty minutes feels like Dharmesh Darshan watched Hum Aapke Hain Koun and decided to strip away every ounce of innocent joy until only the corporate boardroom meetings remained. Bollywood movies of this vintage possessed a very specific brand of glossy misery that directors deployed like a blunt instrument, and this one leans into that aesthetic with a stubborn, almost admirable lack of self-awareness. The plot, such as it is, concerns two lifelong friends who end up married to different people because of a series of miscommunications that could have been resolved by a two-minute cell phone conversation, though to be fair, cell phones in 2002 were still the size of house bricks and mostly used by businessmen who yelled into them while standing on balconies. Karisma Kapoor plays Pooja, a woman whose primary dramatic function is to wear extremely bright blue contact lenses and look slightly confused whenever someone enters a room without knocking.

The direction by Darshan never quite settles on whether it wants to be a domestic drama about the slow erosion of trust or a standard-issue romantic triangle where everyone wears matching pastels during the song sequences. He frames dialogue scenes with a static medium shot that stays put for so long you start noticing dust motes dancing in the studio lights, which happens during a rather crucial confrontation between Kapoor and Akshay Kumar near a window that clearly overlooks a painted canvas of London. Akshay Kumar plays Shiv, a man whose profession is never entirely clear to me despite multiple scenes of him walking around with architectural blueprints rolled up under his arm like a dead fish. He has this tic where he strokes his chin whenever Kapoor speaks, a gesture that seems designed to convey deep masculine contemplation but mostly just makes him look like he is trying to remember if he turned the gas off at home. Hindi movies often struggle with the transition from the bubbly pre-interval romance to the post-interval angst, but here the gear shift is so abrupt it gave me whiplash, dropping the characters from a breezy hill station montage directly into a sterile drawing room where everyone speaks in hushed, echoing tones about the sanctity of marriage.

There is a supporting actor who plays Kapoor’s boss, a man whose dialogue has been so obviously dubbed in a tiny concrete recording booth in Bandra that his lips finish sentences a full second before the audio track catches up, and every time he appears on screen my focus drifted entirely away from the emotional stakes of the scene. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he opened his mouth because the audio engineers didn't even bother to add room reverb to match the cavernous office set. Meanwhile, Abhishek Bachchan plays Raj, the third corner of this increasingly cramped polygon, and he brings a certain hangdog sincerity to the role that doesn't quite mesh with the slick marketing campaign that tried to sell him as the next big action star of Hindi films. He shares a scene with Kapoor on a bench where they discuss the nature of destiny while eating ice cream that is so obviously melting under the studio hot lights that you can watch the strawberry syrup run down the cone in real time, a tiny accidental detail that provides more genuine drama than the actual dialogue about broken promises. The screenplay treats its female characters with that particular brand of 2000s melodrama where a woman is either a saint who forgives all transgressions or a shrew who demands emotional honesty, leaving Kapoor very little room to maneuver between the tear-stained close-ups.

Nadeem-Shravan provided the soundtrack, and the title track repeats so often during the runtime that I started hearing it in my kitchen two hours after the credits rolled, looping through my brain like an uninvited houseguest. The songs arrive with the mechanical regularity of a train schedule, each one dropping the narrative dead in its tracks so the actors can change into clothes that defy all meteorological logic, considering they are supposedly filming in a brisk English autumn. Kapoor dances with a kind of disciplined exhaustion, hitting every mark with military precision while Kumar looks entirely focused on not dropping her during the more complicated lift routines. It reminds me of watching similar sequences in Dhadkan, where the emotional weight of the musical numbers felt genuinely earned by the preceding narrative, whereas here the songs function mostly as commercial breaks inserted by a director who knows the story is running out of steam. The cinematography by W.B. Rao washes everything in a sickly teal filter that was apparently mandatory for urban romances made around the turn of the millennium, turning human skin tones into something resembling unbaked pie crust. Shadows are nonexistent inside these giant mansions, which feature sweeping staircases that lead to nowhere in particular and glass coffee tables cluttered with giant ceramic urns that no one ever knocks over during domestic disputes.

The thematic ambitions of the project are aggressively conventional, beating you over the head with notions of duty and sacrifice until you long for someone to just smash a vase or throw a tantrum. Nobody ever says what they actually mean, preferring instead to stare out of tinted car windows while soulful playback singers voice their internal monologues with far too many string instruments swelling in the background. It creates this bizarre disconnect where the people on screen are behaving with the emotional flexibility of garden gnomes while the soundtrack tries to convince us we are watching a Greek tragedy set in a Mumbai high-rise. Kapoor manages to salvage a few moments of genuine vulnerability during her breakdown scenes, using her eyes to signal a fatigue that the script refuses to acknowledge, but she is constantly fighting against a narrative structure that views her character primarily as a moral prize to be won by whichever man displays the most patience during a musical interlude. By the time Kumar makes his grand gesture at the airport—because every romance from this era legally required an airport climax involving security guards who do nothing while unauthorized civilians breach the tarmac—the emotional investment has long since leaked out of the story like air from a punctured tire, leaving only the clothes and the soundtrack and the memory of that terrible leather jacket.