It is the supporting cast which is spot on, especially Rajesh Sharma and Deepak Dobriyal. But more than anything else, it is the mawkish sentimentality which overcomes the story-telling.

Kangana keeps us watching. With her plain unvarnished face, and mobile features, she comes across as a real, solid, complex woman, someone you can reach out and touch. When she’s on the top of her game, helping us ignore so many of the film’s loopholes, she’s glorious. It’s a pity her own story lets her down.

The Arjun Rampal starrer has a thickly-populated circuitous plot, which goes back and forth in time, which comes in the way of a solid crime thriller cum study of the making of a gangster.

Whenever the plot feels like it, it picks up on Sunny Deol’s punchy dialogues from his past films. This really tired device only serves to remind us of a time when Sunny made watchable films.

This comedy of middle-class-Dilli-manners-and-mores suffers from a sit-com flatness. And when everything is meant to make us laugh, you can quite easily deflect attention from the main premise. The Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar film resists the temptation to tart up the ordinary, which is the best part: no one’s calling attention quirky, everyone is real.

Because it’s the old masala entertainment genre, we sit back and enjoy a few familiar guilty pleasures — the item song (Sunny Leone shaking it), the ‘seeti-maar’ dialogues (the deep-seated misogyny in a few make you cringe, even as you hear, without a shred of surprise, bunches of young men guffawing), the cheerful absence of logic (what’s that), and coherent plot points.

Nawaz is fully immersed in his role; as is Goswami. The banter between Babu and Banke makes you smile. And then you are back to the film playing out the beats of the genre. It’s all there, but we’ve seen it all, or variations of it, before.

Sidharth Malhotra who helms this enterprise plays a good guy who can also be bad. Now while the handsome Sidharth is perfectly pitched as the ‘sundar’ and ‘susheel’ fella of the title, he isn’t quite as convincing in his ‘risky’ avatar.

Rajkummar Rao blows away the weaknesses of this film with his consummate act, playing the timid ‘chota shehari’ on the one hand, and the loud ‘rangbaaz’ on the other. He sweetens the pot, and makes up for the rest of it.

It’s fitting that Akshay Kumar has greenlit and played the lead in this film, which is more a primer of How To Break Social Taboos and Make Toilets rather than a powerful social drama. The moment a film succumbs to being the carrier of a Message as opposed to a message, it becomes burdened.