The problem lies not in Padmaavat being a costume drama, but in the fact that there is too much costume, too little drama. In the film’s opening scene, we see a king chewing roughly on a piece of poultry. This is a surprisingly small, tandoori-sized handful of bird, nothing compared to the way we have, in international film and television, watched vikings gnaw at giant animal legs the size of motorcycles. Therein lies the problem. There’s not nearly enough meat.

At an exhausting two hours and forty minutes, I really don’t care if Tiger is alive or a vegetable – whether he’s Zinda or Tinda, really – but this film needed to be much tighter.

To me, the big and mysterious crime this film brings to light is the way Sidharth Malhotra now finds himself typecast as a novelist. It happened in Kapoor And Sons, and it happened here again, in this film that describes him as a “mashoor novelist” and where cops chase a murder suspect down the street yelling “Ei, writer!” as if it were an expletive. Then again, to those who make Hindi cinema these days, perhaps it is.

Chef holds no secret sauce of its own, but perhaps we shouldn’t be that surprised. There is only that much you can do with a reheated film.

Any good escape film requires detailed plotting, however, and Lucknow Central is frequently stupid. The prisoners wanting to break out, to give you just one example, stash fake police uniforms in their drum set – even though their band doesn’t ever play or practice with drums.

Kangana Ranaut’s solid performance keeps the film watchable, but Simran is ultimately an exhausting film.

Playing a developmentally disabled young man, Salman Khan gives one of the worst performances of his career

I suggest you avoid this moist mess. The reason the Baywatch series became such a sensation – only outside of the United States, mind you – was that for many countries, this was one of the hottest things we could watch while pretending there was a plot in there somewhere. This was a time before the internet, or at least before the World Wide Web allowed us to download images fast enough. “I’ll be there,” as Hasselhoff sang during those unforgettable opening credits, was a promise that Baywatch would bring us sun and skimpiness and spunk. Now it feels like a threat.

The plotting is oafish, the character motivations are boringly shallow, and there seems to have been a catastrophic misreading of what palace politics entail. Bajpayee, Bachchan and Ronit Roy are wasted, but have it better than the women. The great Rohini Hattangadi is given nothing to do and vanishes midway through, while Yami Gautam appears incredibly vacuous, the actress perhaps unaware what to do because she doesn’t usually get to stay alive and unharmed in her films.

The fundamental problem with Phillauri, I believe, may be one of miscasting. Raza Murad, the man with the greatest voice of all, is around but doesn’t get to speak much. Sharma, similarly, is perfectly suitable as a ghost when gliding around or trying to blow out a chandelier bulb, but, despite sparkly translucence, she has no aura. It is in flashback that she sparks brightest, when she listens to a record for the first time, or when she allows herself to grin at the idea of shamelessness. Life becomes her.