Will Smith wearing a custom Gucci tracksuit while attempting a backflip off a cafeteria table in Dehradun is an image that stays with you, mostly because it looks so completely unauthorized by reality. It happens about twenty minutes into Student of the Year 2, which is already a peculiar piece of cinema before the Fresh Prince wanders into frame playing a visiting American alumni who apparently has nothing better to do than adjudicate collegiate track-and-field disputes. The movie was supposed to be a straightforward youth-market play for the Hindi film audience, retaining the glossy DNA of Karan Johar’s original 2012 hit while swapping the cast out for newer faces. But then someone somehow managed to cast the Fresh Prince alongside Tiger Shroff and Alia Bhatt, who pops up for an extended cameo in a dance sequence that costs more than the GDP of several small island nations, and the entire enterprise takes on the fever-dream quality of a high-budget algorithm malfunction. Punit Malhotra directs with the frantic energy of a man trying to outrun a falling safe, cutting between slow-motion hair flips and drone shots of sprawling college campuses that somehow manage to look both aggressively sterile and entirely fabricated on a soundstage in suburban Mumbai.

The screenplay by Arshad Syed tries to juggle three distinct narrative tracks involving class resentment, institutional corruption, and the complicated geopolitics of inter-collegiate Kabaddi tournaments, which is honestly too many things for a movie that mostly exists to showcase various expensive Italian loafers. Shroff plays Rohan, a working-class kid from Pauri who gets a sports scholarship to St. Teresa’s College, a fictional institution that appears to be funded entirely by designer sunglasses and helicopter rentals. He spends the first half-hour glowering at rich kids before realizing he can just out-dance them, a conflict resolution strategy that lacks dramatic tension. Then Will Smith shows up as Uncle Earl, a fictionalized version of himself who dispenses vague motivational advice about resilience while wearing tinted aviators indoors. It's a small thing but it bugged me that nobody in the film ever addresses why a global movie star is casually hanging around a canteen in Uttarakhand drinking bad instant coffee, but the actors just roll with it because the paycheck cleared. Alia Bhatt enters later for a song called "The Hookup Song" redux, and her screen presence is so aggressively charismatic that she single-handedly drains all the oxygen out of the frame, making everyone else look like they are reading their lines off the back of a cereal box.

Tiger Shroff is basically doing his usual routine of backflipping over motorbikes and taking his shirt off at the slightest provocation, which worked fine in Baaghi 2 but feels strangely out of place in a romantic triangle involving rival university cliques. His acting range consists of either looking intensely sad while staring at a pair of muddy sneakers or grinning like a golden retriever who just found a sausage on the pavement. He has zero chemistry with either of his co-stars, but to be fair, the dialogue consists almost entirely of shouting slogans about winning and brotherhood across sunlit quadrangles. Will Smith, meanwhile, is clearly operating on a different plane of existence, delivering his Hindi-dubbed punchlines with the bewildered charm of a man who wandered onto the wrong set while looking for the craft services table. He does a bhangra step in the climax that looks less like traditional choreography and more like a high-end rehabilitation exercise, yet you cannot look away from him.

The cinematography by Ravi K. Chandran relies so heavily on soft-focus lens flares and amber backlighting that characters frequently appear to be glowing from within like radioactive marshmallows. Every single frame is aggressively color-graded to suggest an endless golden hour that never actually exists in any college on Earth, least of all one nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas. Vishal-Shekhar’s soundtrack is loud and percussive, dominated by metallic synth beats that rattle the subwoofer during every single romantic buildup. There is a recurring saxophone motif that plays every time the villain looks smugly at his wristwatch, and it repeats so often you start to feel like a Pavlovian dog being trained to associate brass instruments with mild annoyance. The editing by Ritesh Soni uses about forty different wipe transitions that haven’t been popular since Windows Movie Maker was dominating the home video market, giving the dramatic scenes the aesthetic of a corporate training video for an MLM company.

Somewhere beneath the layers of gloss and product placement, there is a half-formed critique about the widening gulf between India's elite private institutions and the rest of the country, but the movie is far too cowardly to actually engage with it. When Rohan complains about the fee structure at St. Teresa’s, the script immediately pivots to a dance-off in the rain rather than letting him articulate any genuine grievance, because mainstream Hindi movies are terrified of alienating multiplex audiences with actual poverty. It's not great, not bad, just there. The film wants to be a modern fairy tale about upward mobility through athletics, but it treats education as a minor inconvenience that interrupts the real business of looking good in slow motion. When the credits finally roll over a blooper reel featuring Will Smith trying and failing to pronounce local Maharashtrian street food names, you are left wondering how this particular collision of Hollywood royalty and Bollywood muscle ever made it past the initial pitch meeting without someone intervening.