To be fair, I’m not the target group for this movie. It’s probably aimed at audiences aged 14 or 15 or under (whether mentally or chronologically). All I could do was wonder what was getting on my nerves more: screechy Sonam’s over-acting or a terribly underwhelming story-line. Now that’s a tough call.

If you disengage yourself from logic of any kind, it still sort of works, although some will buy it, many others won’t. Some of the twists and set-ups are quite clever, even if done in by the rest of the film.

You’re bored to death wondering when the heroine will just morph into a female Salman and get on with it. Oh, she does, but only very briefly. Ah okay. Then what’s the point.

Films that are so meticulously designed to become a hit, more often than not, hit your head really hard. This picture is not an exception in that sense.

You know the actual content will be the filler between stunts involving somersaults and rubbing salt on open wounds, or as in this case, literally shooting at the villains’ bums. So you sit back, push some cotton wool into your ears and ideally wear a helmet to protect the precious space between the ears, because so many guns firing at the same time can drill a serious hole in your head. If that suits you fine, go ahead then, drill a hole in your wallet as well.

As filmmakers, they’ve managed to achieve the near impossible— managed to make Sajid Khan’s slapstick Humshakals look great in comparison. As if unsure of their movie’s intent, they’ve even titled it Entertainment. I’m sorry, but if this is entertainment, then I want to know what’s the word for a person banging his head against the wall for over two hours, having shelled out money to do that as well? No, don’t answer that.

From all Salman Khan movies, you rarely remember any other actor, besides Salman himself, which is just as well, because that is what audiences pay for. This one also stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the villain who appears in all of four or five scenes. He pitches his performance as high as the rest of the movie. Yet, you can immediately tell, especially when he is opposite Salman, that if this country had great actors for mainstream stars, blockbuster films with scripts as deliberately insane as this one, would begin to seem infinitely more tolerable still.

There is a twist at the end of this film that is way over-smart for its own good. By this point you already know Pizza (the movie) is frikin’ cold—not in a way that sends chills down your spine, which is what I had hoped for, since audiences down South, I’m told, have hugely appreciated this film’s original version in Tamil. This leaves you cold in a way that you casually stroll out of the theatre sighing, “Whatever boss.” What a waste.

By the end of it, you’re not sure if this is a soft passionate number on how love conquers all. Or a hard-core psychotic pic about a serial killer with a screwdriver, like one of those crazy Korean blood-fests, one of which, Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw The Devil (2010), has inspired the filmmakers here.

The film tries to be both. You don’t want to know how they’ve linked these two genres together. It doesn’t matter. The serial killer needs psychological help. You will too, if you get too drawn into the story.

A series of bad gags is still better than a bad film that takes itself seriously. Therefore we give comedy the long rope. This one is dedicated to Kishore Kumar, Peter Sellers and Jim Carrey for inspiration. You could find yourself chuckling during certain initial portions of Humshakals, even though you would be laughing at the film rather than with it.

Yeah, this could have been Ranbir Kapoor’s Rangeela. It’s funny in some parts but nowhere as good and only half as much fun as director Abhinav Kashyap’s Dabanng.