Thank goodness, I saw this movie with a friend so we could giggle and whisper together through it. Only way to make it an enjoyable experience! If you want to go, for sure go with a friend. Or else wait for streaming and do a virtual watch with a friend.

What can I say? I kept thinking that maybe if this were an actual 90s movie, with all that insanity and cheapness and over the top I would enjoy it. But no, I think even if it were in the 90s as it was so clearly intended to be, I would still be bored. I think what was missing was consistancy? Like, for a bad movie to be enjoyable, you need to be able to create your own running gags. When you watch Duplicate, you can make fun of Evil Shahrukh’s terrible mouth movements. Or if you watch The Princess Switch, you can make fun of the hilarious pronunciation of “shed-yule”. But without those landmarks of badness that become more amusing and almost endearing as you go on, there is just nothing worth laughing at.

This movie, no consistency! Our hero has and loses skills at random, and so does the villain. Characters wonder in and out, the plot makes no sense to the degree where I can’t tell where we are in time or not. And there are things that are SUPPOSED to be callbacks, for instance the heroes codename of “Plumber”, but we only hear it twice so it being treated as a callback is just more confusing. Something as small as consistently seeing our hero riding a mechanical bike would be comforting and enjoyable, but instead even his mode of transit varies widely.

What would have been slightly better/more enjoyable if it were in the 90s is that the 90s Hindi cinema itself had an internal consistency. Maybe this particular movie couldn’t manage callbacks, but when a character like “indulgent cop who loves lovers” shows up it feels familiar from all the other movies with that character. And the club song, and the heroine song, and the familiar actors playing their familiar character types. It still wouldn’t be a GOOD movie, not with this level of acting and dialogue and plot, but it wouldn’t feel like such a slog if we had those little landmarks of familiarity and recognizable types.

But this is very much a 2022 movie. All the songs are “imaginative” instead of fitting in standard types. The hero is blandybland Tiger. The heroine is Even Blander Tara Sutaria. Nawazuddin does what he can with the villain, but it feels like a rip off of a variety of other more interesting villains instead of a cohesive original, or Type, kind of character. The action scenes are painfully dull (at least for me). They try to have Tiger do all kinds of different fight techniques, but either the choreographer is limited or Tiger is, so it’s just the same 4 moves over and over again. If it was straight up the same fight, if they leaned into it like giving him a “Magic Kick”, then it would be fun. But instead it’s just a dull mash that doesn’t reach uniqueness it all.

I guess that’s the best metaphor. Imagine a cafeteria. You can either have 4 dishes nice and comforting and solidly made, like meatloaf and mashed potatoes and cake and creamed spinach. It’s not the greatest ever, but it’s filling and familiar. Or, you can try to make 20 different dishes, but only using 4 spices, and they all end up tasting kind of the same so that you can’t even tell them apart. This movie throws in something new every five minutes and it’s just BORING. It’s not even spectacular new, it’s stupid new like switching from a bike to a horse to a car to a motorcycle. Why not stick with one vehicle and do it well????

So, yeah, only see it if you can go with a friend and make fun of it!