Varun Dhawan squints against a glare that doesn't seem to exist in the actual room, and right there, in the first five minutes, the movie establishes an alarming tolerance for the kind of broad acting that makes high school theater look like Cassavetes. David Dhawan is remaking his own 1995 hit, a choice born of either supreme confidence or a total lack of fresh scripts in a corner of the industry that has long survived on recycled fumes. If I'm honest, the original Govinda vehicle was never exactly high art, but it had a manic physical intelligence that anchored the absurd plotting. This new version replaces that frenetic energy with a glossy, airless sheen, sanding down every rough edge until the comedy slips right through your fingers. You watch these actors strain against the void, shouting punchlines into a vacuum, wondering if anyone on set bothered to check the monitor.

The plotting follows Raju, a porter who pretends to be a filthy rich billionaire to trick a pompous matchmaker and win the hand of his wealthy daughter. It is a premise built entirely on misunderstandings that could be cleared up by a five-minute phone call, which forces the screenplay to work overtime keeping everyone stupid. Characters walk into rooms they have no business entering. They believe the most ridiculous lies without blinking. The narrative mechanics creak so loudly you can practically hear the writers sweating over Final Draft at four in the morning. Screenplays for modern Hindi movies often suffer from this compulsive need to explain every single joke twice, just in case the audience got distracted by their phones, and this script is the poster child for that anxiety. Every gag arrives with a neon sign pointing right at it. Even the supporting players, reliable veterans like Bharti Achrekar who usually know how to squeeze juice from a dry lemon, get swallowed up by the relentless tide of exposition.

As the romantic lead, Sara Ali Khan spends most of her screen time looking confused by her own dialogue, delivering lines with the flat, rehearsed precision of someone reciting a grocery list. She lacks the effortless screwball cadence that the material demands, treating the farce as if it were a solemn period drama about grief. Across from her, Varun Dhawan tries desperately to channel Govinda’s rubber-limbed anarchy, pulling faces that belong in a silent cartoon while wearing pastel suits that hurt the eyes. He runs, he jumps, he gesticulates wildly until his veins pop, but the effort is too visible. Comedy of this sort requires a lightness of touch, a sense that the performer is merely playing rather than laboring under heavy chains, and Dhawan looks like he is hauling actual bricks up a mountain. When they share a scene together, the romantic chemistry registers somewhere near zero on any known scale, leaving you to wonder why these two people are even bothering.

Speaking of small irritations, it is worth mentioning the looping on Paresh Rawal's dialogue, which sounds throughout the second half like it was recorded inside a metal bucket using an iPhone 4. It pulls you right out of the film every time he opens his mouth, a sloppy technical oversight that suggests nobody involved in post-production cared enough to fix the sync. The cinematography by Ravi K. Chandran doesn't help matters either, washing every frame in an institutional digital blue that makes even a luxury hotel suite look like a dentist's waiting room. The soundtrack, recycling old hits with unnecessary EDM drops, pounds away at your eardrums with the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. It is an assault of sights and sounds designed to distract you from the fact that nothing of any consequence is happening on screen.

Class anxiety drives the engine of the original narrative, however crudely it was handled back in the nineties, but this update strips away whatever little social bite was there to begin with. The rich people are just cartoonishly wealthy and the poor people are aggressively cheerful, existing in a sanitized bubble where nobody has to worry about inflation or rent. Wealth in these stories used to be a distant, glamorous fantasy, whereas here it looks like an Instagram feed belonging to an influencer who bought their followers. The film refuses to engage with the reality of contemporary life, preferring instead to retreat into a nostalgic past that never actually existed. When you compare it to a genuinely biting social satire like Delhi Belly, the sheer laziness of the enterprise becomes staggering. One movie uses vulgarity and chaos to skewer middle-class anxieties, while the other just spends two hours throwing pastel paint at a wall.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in about an hour into this viewing experience, a feeling that you are trapped in a loop of unfunny gags and shouting matches. You start noticing the background extras standing around with blank expressions. You watch the boom mic dip into the top left corner of a wide shot during a supposed emotional confrontation. You wonder how much catering cost on this particular Tuesday. The film doesn't earn the right to be this loud, this long, or this aggressively stupid, asking the audience to supply all the energy it fails to generate on its own. When the credits finally roll, offering a merciful release from the neon purgatory, there is no sense of having watched a completed journey, only the lingering impression of a very expensive ghost town.