There is a specific kind of sound a wedding band makes when the generator is struggling against the diesel load, a dry, choked chug that manages to bleed through the dialogue tracks of almost every mid-budget Hindi film made between 1995 and now, and Abhishek Sharma’s Suraj Pe Mangal Bhari starts with that exact frequency before dropping us into a mid-nineties Bombay that looks less like a period piece and more like a set built behind a film institute in Andheri. I sat there in the dark watching Manoj Bajpayee slide into another fake mustache—this one bushy enough to harbor migratory birds—and wondered why we keep asking actors who can play Gangs of Wasseypur to settle for playing uncles who yell at caterers. The plot kicks off because Manoj’s character, a wedding detective named Madhu Mangal Rane, gets fired from a catering gig for spitting paan onto a sherwani, which is as good a motivation for a lifetime vendetta as any, leading him to sabotage a nice, honest, somewhat simple-minded boy named Suraj Singh Dhillon, played by Diljit Dosanjh with the exhausted patience of a man who just wants to eat his butter chicken in peace.

Abhishek Sharma directs like a man who has seen three hundred capers and refuses to let any of them influence him beyond the broad strokes of a mistaken-identity farce. The editing leaves these weird, jagged gaps between scenes, sometimes cutting away from a conversation before the punchline has even landed in the room, as if the projectionist was falling asleep at the splice block. I found myself staring at the background extras who frequently just stand around holding plastic chairs or walking slowly past shopfronts in opposite directions for ten minutes straight. There’s a distinct lack of spatial geography in the chase sequences, which mostly seem to occur in the same narrow alleyway behind what looks like a dormant textile mill, lit by an afternoon sun that changes intensity from shot to shot without warning. The screenplay by Shokhee Banerjee and Neha Sharma relies heavily on characters shouting exposition while riding bicycles or sitting in Ambassador cars that are clearly being towed on flatbeds, bouncing around with that artificial enthusiasm Bollywood movies sometimes mistake for kinetic energy.

Fatima Sana Shaikh arrives about twenty minutes in as Tulsi Rane, Madhu’s sister who wears leather jackets and rides a scooter with a kick-start that fails on the second attempt every single time. She spends half her screen time squinting at Diljit through aviator glasses while trying to maintain a Marathi accent that wanders off to Delhi whenever she gets angry, which is often. Neha Pendse pops up as a matchmaker who has about as much chemistry with the main plot as a wet sponge, yet she delivers her lines with a fierce, eye-rolling commitment that puts the rest of the supporting cast to shame. It’s hard to care about the romance when the central deception involves fake background checks and forged wedding albums that wouldn't fool an eight-year-old with a scanner, but the actors lean into the silliness with a kind of desperate energy that keeps the thing moving even when the script stalls out entirely.

There is a noticeable drop in the audio mixing during the second reel where Diljit’s voice shifts from a clean studio dub to something that sounds like it was recorded inside a metal locker with an iPhone. That sort of low-stakes technical sloppiness bugged me more than the logic gaps in the cat-and-mouse game between the detective and his target. The soundtrack by Javed-Mohsin sits heavily on the scenes like cheap syrup, telling us when to laugh and when to feel slightly bad for Suraj as his marriage prospects vanish one by one. The cinematography by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan goes for this washed-out, pastel-heavy palette that makes Bombay look like a box of chalk left out in the rain, lacking the grit of actual nineties period pieces like Satya or even the glossy warmth of standard romance templates. He relies on wide-angle lenses that distort the edges of the frame, making the background actors look like they are bending away from the camera whenever Manoj Bajpayee starts yelling about caste certificates.

Underneath the slapstick and the rubber mustaches, the movie tries to say something about the anxiety of modern middle-class matchmaking, where a single bad review on a neighborhood gossip network can ruin a man’s chances of finding a bride who likes him. This theme gets buried under endless sequences of Manoj dressing up as a Gujarati businessman and a Tamil priest with equal amounts of enthusiasm and poor pronunciation. The film never really decides if it wants to be a social satire about patriarchal anxieties over female agency or just a vehicle for Diljit to sing a melancholy song while staring out a rainy bus window. When the two tones collide, the result is neither sharp nor particularly funny, just a long succession of scenes where people argue in small kitchens while a fan rotates slowly overhead, making that rhythmic ticking sound that drives you crazy if you’re sitting too close to the speakers.

The closing stretch abandons all pretense of a plot and turns into a frantic rush through a crowded railway station where nobody seems to notice the man in the orange wig running away from three different people holding cake boxes. It’s an exhausting way to wrap things up, leaving us with a final shot of the main characters smiling awkwardly at the camera while the credits roll over a blooper reel that features more genuine laughter than the preceding two hours. There is no grand statement here, no clever deconstruction of the genre, and not much in the way of lasting value. It’s the kind of movie that plays on a television set in the corner of a sweets shop while three men discuss the price of onions, perfectly content to fill the room with noise until everyone goes home for the evening.