The film is thus made a one-time watch simply to revisit SRK-Kajol, experience breathtaking locations spiced up with VFX and watch an even more colorful (thanks to budgets) world than normal of Shetty’s cars and his version of Goa.

“Bajirao Mastani” is a great one-time big-screen watch. A crisper edit and stronger content in the second half could have made this one a classic.

In short, if you liked “Hate Story” and loved “Hate Story 2” (and thrillers should be cerebral and logical), then “Hate Story 3” will be a complete anti-climax despite the smart mounting. Go home and think, and you will realize that the film conned you — of the believable story that it could so easily have narrated within the same context.

…unless you are terrible addicts of one or more of Ali, Padukone, Kapoor or Rahman, stay away and go watch a riveting nautanki instead!

…simply something that will not connect at all with the non-pseudos who form 98 percent of the audiences for Hindi cinema. The film is also partly in Tamil and predominantly in English. And at 105 minutes, clearly more than a quarter of it is sleep-inducing!

The wait has been long — both for a Sooraj Barjatya film (nine years) and a Sooraj-Salman collaboration (16 years). The wait has indeed been worth it, and Barjatya can well relax, for he has managed to connect in times when the positive values he likes to project in his movies are considered laughably archaic.

As a film, it works overall despite the flawed screenplay and the overdone gimmicks like animation, excessive VFX and DI and what-have-you. Somewhere in the confusion, director Vikas Bahl, the man who made two landmark films, “Chillar Party” (with a co-director) and “Queen,” wants to tell a different story in a tried-and-tested genre and ends up telling it decently.