Despite all the foreign locations glitter, this plays out like a flat, meandering TV comedy. What is the ‘ajab’, and where’s the ‘gazabb’?

‘Chakravyuh’ talks of the growing ‘red corridor’ in several parts of the country, and how it came to be, and how it is playing out right here, right now.

When it makes the film preachy, some of the fun is leached out. Save the environment at all cost, but keep the entertainment ticking.

I have a bone to pick with Karan Johar, who invites us once again, to witness a bunch of young students do their thing.

More than anything else, ‘Aiyyaa’ is a film that could have been a truly subversive, exhilarating ride with a sexually aware, sensually charged woman at its centre. What we get is a flat, heavy-footed clomp through screechy lines and overstated, dragged-out situations. this is not a film which generates the sort of mad hysteria that makes you laugh. After a while, it becomes just another film we can’t wait to get out of, despite the trying-to-get-back-in-the-reckoning, still-watchable Rani and the sizzling Prithvi. Taking a cue from one of its songs, I have to say that, post watching, I barely saved myself from being in critical conditionuum.

There are no two ways about it and we’re not even bothering with a pun this time: KLPD is a painful watch that’s better avoided.

If it weren’t for a few tolerable moments between Lucky and Lavina, I would have run right out of the theatre. There are elements here that make you think wistfully of mad capers and insane fun. ‘Kismet Love Paisa Dilli’ is most definitely not that film.

‘Heroine’ has every single stereotype associated with Bollywood that we are familiar with, from our newspaper supplements, tabloid gossip, sensational TV programmes, fanzines, social networking platforms.

Out come all the ‘sadhus’ and ‘babas’ with their ‘mantras’, and the `bhagwaan ki moorti’, and it all boils down to the same old battle against good and evil, borrowing from older horror tropes from here and there.

Can kids watch this, I asked myself as I watched this all-over-the-place faradiddle. And then I dismissed it. Because even children, especially children, need a story that holds, and characters that engage.