What I wasn’t prepared for was just how similar it would be, despite the change in leads , and after a point, just how listless it would turn out to be.

The laughs came intermittently through the first half, and I was still sitting in my seat at the interval. And then it turned into the same old story : the plot, which was thinner than a self-respecting wafer to start with, just gives up and dies, and the lead pair, Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone stop talking to each other and begin posturing. They have no competition from anything else : the trademark Shetty bang bang –car chases, jeeps blowing up, large groups of people charging at each other—is by now more eye glaze than ever.

Turning the tables on someone usually is a fun thing. But the execution is amateurish, so is most of the acting, even if Dobriyal keeps some of it humming. This may have been a good half hour reality show, perhaps, but doesn’t have enough for a full-length feature film.

Mohan Sikka’s short story ‘The Railway Aunty’, on which the film is based, uses its atmosphere of defeat and rancidness much better. In the film, Bahl creates claustrophobia well, and then loses the story and the characters in it. We want to see underneath, and what we get, instead, is neon glaze.

The trouble with Rabba Main Kya Karoon, as with most of these films which showcase a pair of inexperienced newcomers with a solid, ill-used supporting cast, is that it settles too easily into a sexist, let’s-dump-on–these-idiot-women mode. This movie’s idea of laughs is to have Tinnu Anand search for a bra, Paresh Rawal snuggle up to a woman with her cleavage hanging out, and an orange-wigged Shakti Kapoor chase skirt.

Issaq is, then, an insultingly bad film.

The film turns out to be clichéd and largely choppy: an idea by itself is never enough, it’s what you do with it that counts.

It is by far the most original, the most poignantly realised, the most thought-provoking film that I have seen in longer than I care to remember.

There really is nothing more to say other than I really felt each minute of the nearly three hours hang like lead. Every single cliché in the book is thrown into the mix, with poor Poonam Dhillon as the mother-of- the- boy-from-hell, and Randhir Kapoor as the father-of- the-boy- trying hard to act sensible, having to mouth the most inane lines. I had not an iota of interest in the leads, neither in the first-time Kumar, nor in Haasan who appears a veteran in comparison. My heart goes out to Sonu Sood who is a good actor, and who gets stuck in this kind of tripe.

There is heartbreak, and heartache here, minus exaggeration. And some life-affirming scenes, even if the film nearly ends on a lecture about how 16-year-olds can be the most misunderstood breed. This Sixteen is slight, but stays fresh and honest for the most part.