Saif Ali Khan keeps a toothpick in his mouth for the first twenty minutes of Hamesha, and if I'm honest, it distracts from whatever dramatic gravity Sanjay Gupta was trying to establish in those early reels. Bollywood movies from the mid-nineties had this stubborn habit of throwing every genre blender setting into a single narrative until the plot curdled, which is roughly what happens here once reincarnation enters the chat with all the subtlety of a falling anvil. You get the sense that everyone on set knew they were working with recycled parts from a dozen better melodramas, yet they showed up anyway because the paychecks cleared and the lights were on.

Director Sanjay Gupta tries to dress up a completely ridiculous script about past-life vengeance using high-contrast lighting and sweeping crane shots that clearly cost more than the logic holding the second half together. The screenplay stumbles over its own feet whenever it has to explain how Raja and Raju swap places or remember who killed who in the previous birth, opting instead for loud background music and actors staring intensely into the middle distance. It plays like a rough draft of Karan Arjun that lost its budget and its sense of humor halfway through the shoot, leaving behind a hollowed-out shell where standard genre tropes march in single file. There is an edit right before the interval block where the camera lingers on Aroona Irani's face for four full seconds after she stops speaking, and that dead air tells you everything about the pacing problems dragging the whole enterprise down.

Kajol tries to rescue the emotional wreckage by throwing her entire physical energy into scenes that honestly deserve about half the effort, selling grief and confusion with those wide, accusing eyes that made Gupt and Dushman work so well. She is doing the heavy lifting for two people while Saif Ali Khan coasts on a smirk and a wardrobe that looks like it was sponsored by an upscale Bandra boutique, treating his dual role with a breezy indifference that borders on charming if you are already in a forgiving mood. The supporting cast features Kader Khan and Satyen Kappu chewing the scenery with practiced weariness, though Laxmikant Berde gets stranded in comic relief bits that haven't been funny since black-and-white television went out of style. Aditya Panscholi snarls through his scenes as the heavy with a gravelly intensity that feels borrowed from a completely different movie, pacing around rooms like a caged tiger who realizes the script isn't going to let him bite anyone.

The cinematography leans hard into golden hour filters and smoke machines, bathing every romantic flashback in a haze that makes the actors look like they are broadcasting from inside a toasted marshmallow. Anu Malik’s soundtrack hits the standard 1997 notes with predictable percussion loops and soaring romantic strings, though one particular love theme repeats so often during the second hour that you start counting the seconds between brass cues just to stay awake. It is a loud, brassy score that refuses to let a single emotional beat land in silence, underlining every realization and betrayal with orchestral thunder that swamps the dialogue. Hindi films of this vintage often relied on auditory cues to tell the audience how to feel because the narrative transitions were too jagged to manage the heavy lifting on their own.

Reincarnation and undying love form the central pillars of the plot, but the movie treats these metaphysical ideas like bureaucratic hurdles rather than spiritual transformations. Characters remember their past lives not through sudden epiphanies or poetic dream sequences, but through convenient flashbacks triggered by hearing a specific melody or looking at a painting, which drains the concept of any genuine mystery. The notion of karma gets reduced to a simple action-reaction loop where bad men must be punched by good men across multiple centuries, stripping the theme of any moral ambiguity. It is all very literal and very loud, preferring fistfights on construction sites to any internal reckoning about fate or memory.

There is a recurring boom mic shadow dipping into the top left corner of the frame during the climactic confrontation in the ruined fort, and once you spot it, the illusion of tragic grandeur evaporates completely. Hindi movies have survived much worse technical lapses, obviously, but minor flubs like that highlight the rushed production schedule hanging over the entire project like a cloud. Saif delivers his final monologue with a straight face while that microphone bobbles overhead, and the scene just stops being about love or revenge and becomes about technicians sweating in the Mumbai heat.