Bottomline: Well-intentioned, but monotonous.

Designed as a take on a love story between a real-life don, a real-life starlet and a real-life kabab mein haddi, the outcome is as remote from reality as Earth is from Venus and Mars.

He’s on a high, jumping-jackflashin’, jibing and jousting, picking up a sickle as if it was bottled pickle, all in a desperate bid to tickle your funny bone. Sorry, except for a few stray laugh-out-loudish moments, here’s a bad trip. Shah Rukh Khan springs no surprises, re-rendering every old trick in the acting book. Indeed, it’s disheartening to see him overact. Gratifyingly, Deepika Padukone sparkles: consistently radiant and restrained in the mayhem.

At most, here’s old ‘Nasha’ in a new bottle. Tastes flat.

Do let the bard rest in peace, guys.

Conceptually alas, this globe-trotting enterprise is a non-non, bereft of a substantial storyline, and so excessively dedicated to its producer-cum-heroine showing off a range of casual chic costumes, that it ends up looking like an extended photo-session.

Apart from the all-too-contrived screenplay – really, how much dramatic licence can you grant irrelevant flashbacks? – Nair’s tiresomely tangled film articulates too little and too late.

Just a small recommendation for speed flick buffs: beg, borrow or steal DVDS of Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965)and John Frankheimer’s Grand Prix (1965) . The Fast and Furious series pale by comparison to them, despite the new millennium’s technical haberdashery.

Indeed, here’s so much plotting and planning going yawn, that you lose track of what’s going on in the cauldron of political ambitions and quickie sex.

Whatever the entertainment value of writer-director Neeraj Pandey’s ‘Special 26’ may be, it glorifies crime to an intolerable extent. Although based loosely on the daring, unsolved heist at Mumbai’s Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri jewellery shop in 1987, the screenplay has far too many loose ends, besides encouraging the thought that crime pays.