• You keep looking for something to hold on to, and you keep coming up empty.

  • There are a couple of scary moments, but no relentless stretches of heart-in-mouth terror, the kind that binds this kind of thriller. Even the shark waits politely for the song to end before launching forth.

  • If it hadn’t been for the occasional flatness, and a couple of predictable notes, there would have been no flaws in this dabba. I also found Ila’s mother’s (Lillete Dubey) segment, included solely to underline another kind of vacantness, a little forced. But these are tiny niggles in this film that gets the rest of it so right. Batra’s characters are a delight. They may be of Mumbai, infused with intense desi flavours, but can inhabit any part of the world. You want to take them home, sit them down at your table, and savour them, one mouthful at a time.

  • On this one-liner of a plot, Rajkumar Santoshi has built a two-and-a-half-hour film which is meant to make us laugh, but ends up making us groan instead.

  • The matter-of-factness with which brutal acts are interspersed through this film, and the zest with which they are carried out, made me think that this must be a copy of some Hollywood film. But the rest of it is weighed down with childhood angst in a very European fashion.

  • No one expects films of this sort – boys and their toys – to be sophisticated or intelligent. By definition, they are meant to be crass and tasteless. But then filmmakers getting into this should go the whole hog, and give us what they promise: there was nothing adult in what I saw, only pubescent groping. In a slack tale, laden with stale lines, and a moral science lecture tagged on.

  • The nicest part of this romcom, which triangulates girl-boy-girl in a manner Bollywood is just waking up to, is that it lets its characters talk. Like, you know, real conversations, where faces are turned to each other, where the baat-cheet between a girl and guy moves from checking-each-other-for-size -banter to will-our-noses-fit-if-we-kiss to can’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-other level.

  • The filmmakers have been carefully calling it a “tribute”, and they have added a couple of elements which weren’t in the older film, but to me it was a neither here-nor-there thing: it’s neither faithful remake nor campy, knowing tribute. It’s just a poor copy. So why?

  • …the end is chaos, very far from the non-violent satyagrah that the film propounds: gun-toting hooligans and cops run around the town, ending predictably in noble deaths and lectures on morality and goodness.

  • In trying to keep it fast-moving, the film turns choppy and confusing in parts. Also, a few of the characters are a tad comic book-y, matching the ludicrousness of some dialogues. The high-flying journalist helping the hero bit feels contrived.

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