…a non-stop barrage of stereotypes being played for laughs: rich Sindhi men and their love for living life large, grooms obsessed with their eight-and-a-half packs, limp-wrists and fat waists. Where’s the ‘shaan’ in all this?

Everything is predictable. These are new faces, and yet everything they do smacks of staleness. Overused themes can be infused with freshness only if the treatment is right: here, all elements are borrowed from older films and used so clunkily as to extinguish all freshness.

The first ​had some punch and​ was okay for a bunch of laughs. The sequel is flat and unfunny.

The film, and Gordon-Levitt, shines in this final act, as we watch, with our hearts in our mouths breath suspended, waiting for him to come back safely to the other side. Like the unbelievably fearless Petit, at this high point, you feel you are soaring, weightless, high above the world.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is over-the-top in this convoluted, over-plotted crime-drama…

After the spectacular ‘Baahubali’, we were all set for an encore with ‘Puli’, yet another period fantasy from the South. But this one is a crashing bore.

The only thing which saves it is that it wears its silliness proudly on its hero’s `pug’ ( turban), said hero smartly reworking his good-hearted simpleton who loves his mother and respects his father, and rescues his girl.

‘Timeout’ raises a subject that is usually not tackled with any seriousness in our movies, places it at the heart of the story. For that alone it deserves props.

A hurried after-thought, which talks of how these girls are really, truly ‘proud achievers’, comes right in the end. And it’s just that, an after-thought. The rest of it exploits—smugly, tackily, uncomfortably explicitly—young women being exploited.

The only reason not to run out of the theatre, screaming, is that Sharma displays a surprising flair for underplaying.