The film ends up being a strictly average, and mostly bland, slice of Delhi life. There’s a great deal of Punajbbi Hindi, but that’s par for the course of this kind of template-y film. For variation, we get Bihari, from a guard and his ‘sari’-loving wife whom he has left behind in Darbhanga, and Kanpur Hindi, from Kuku’s ‘badmaash mama’. Sit.com territory, stretched out to accommodate a film.

Even Rajinikanth, the one and the only, can’t pick up a film and run with it, if it has the oldest, creakiest plots cobbled together from many books.

Boy looks at girl. Boy falls for girl. Girl’s father growls. Boy scowls. Girl howls. And I’m left sobbing into my popcorn.

If they had maintained the tone, ‘The Xpose’ would have been a hoot. But songs get stuffed in, a love angle slows things, and it gets stuck in cop stations and courts. They should have just kept the cheese thick. Here’s a sampler, from early in the film. A producer tells an aspirant : “na dance na expression na pose, sirf xpose!”. Classic. Nothing more would have been needed.

There should have been more history and more competence in ‘Children Of War’ for it to be the film it had set out to be.

Mastram turns out to be much too banal. The re-creation of an era which could have lent the film some heft, is wholly missing from the story.

It’s tough to make a true-blue sports film, minus song and dance and melodrama, in Bollywood. This one has tried.

Partho is a natural. We saw that in his first film, the heart-warming ‘Stanley Ka Dabba’. He’s back tugging at our heartstrings, and it’s a pleasure to hear a young actor actually speaking his lines with such conviction. ‘Hawaa Hawaai’ has a big beating heart, but you wish it had been a better film: it trundles on, leaps up intermittently, but doesn’t fly.

The best part is that Manjunath is not played by a known Bollywood face. There’s enough, in the way the film begins, to keep us engaged.

I enjoyed ‘Purani Jeans’ for its freshness in the face of familiarity, and a story that holds all the way to the end.