A film starring a bunch of our top star-actors can be so off the mark is a sobering, dismal thought: this Anil Kapoor-Aishwarya Rai-Rajkummar Rao concoction, based on a Belgian film Everybody’s Famous, is unbelievably awful.

It’s a crowded film, and several characters get short shrift: Soha Ali Khan, as the permanently inebriated ‘second wife’ of Saheb, is blink-and-miss. There’s too much scatter-shot action, with the plot all over the place.

The Ishaan Khatter and Janhvi Kapoor film has neither requisite drama nor authenticity. Dhadak doesn’t work, not as an official copy of Sairat, nor as a standalone Bollywood romance.

iljit Dosanjh as Sandeep Singh is spot on. And that is the film’s biggest triumph. Whenever Dosanjh is on screen, we are with him.

…what we get, and how we get it, in Sanju, is mostly engaging, and some of it good enough to make you laugh out loud in pleasure, especially when Hirani is killing it. But you wonder too what the film chose to leave out, and you wonder if this would have been more of a film if those things had been in here.

The movie is nothing but a recycled bin of too many car chases, explosions, buffed up characters strutting in slo-mo, and wilted lines.

Why did the ladies sign up for this mess? Shriya Saran wears deep pink lipstick and a pout, while Mahie Gill is to be seen in precisely two-and-a-half scenes, with the camera hovering suggestively over both their bosoms.

The film clearly intends to be dark, edgy and cool. Trouble is, it spends too much of its time underlining its purpose, even getting a character to say these three adjectives.

There are moments when you admire the dexterity with which Solo squeezes by yet another fast-closing dark star, or out-runs yet another fizzy missile, and then you are back to looking for something new.

You smile as you see these women laugh out loud, try on gravity-defying undergarments, and try on their dates for size: this is a demographic which needs to be seen so much more because they are so much more at ease with who they are