Unsolicited suggestion: Don’t miss it for Ms Chopra and for the feisty first half. Post-break, you can catch 40, even 400 winks in your seat.

Without a doubt, Prakash Jha — a perennial political complaint box — offers nothing new either by way of content or style. How you’d like insights and information, from him, which you don’t know already. That would amount to excellent cinema, and not just one more star-fuelled trip into a political void. Suggestion: avoid.

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.

In sum, here’s a work which is permissive, graphic – even shocking (for the squeamish) – and rule-breaking. In fact, it recalls the manner is which B R Ishara had sniped away at hypocritical sexual mores back in the 1970s. This is adult cinema, neither cheap nor sniggering, but revelatory of reality behind closed doors. Try it.

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

Do let the bard rest in peace, guys.

Forget all the artsy-tartsy prejudices about Ship of Theseus. Here are three stories well told, signifying independent cinema’s coming of age.

Put on your patience caps for three hours, and try it. There’s enough bang for the bucks here.