102 Not Out is, as I said, a sweet film. It’s nice to see an old Bachchan picture on the wall, circa Abhimaan, just as it is fine to see a photograph of a Khel Khel Mein Kapoor teaching his son math. Yet despite Bachchan and Kapoor – and young Jimit Trivedi, who plays the enthusiastic domestic help with infectious enthusiasm – the film relies too heavily on prosthetics, with liver spots being used either for laughs, or instead of character details. All we ever know about Dattatraya is his decrepitude. For a film about living a full life, that feels rather toothless.

I suspect that this is the kind of average fare that relies on who its viewers are. Many parents might choose to overlook the flimsiness and view this as a winning unbeaten century in a chase. I’m not so sure others may look at it the same way. After all, if an opening batsman scores 102 Not Out in the first innings of an ODI match, it’s more likely that the knock is slow, selfish, self-defeating and bereft of awareness.

No doubt it’s great to see a film about two old people. But we have seen both Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor in that avatar in better films (Piku especially, and in Kapoor & Sons) before this.

Every single gesture is overdone and extra boisterous like Bachchan’s inflated exuberance and screaming prosthetics, reminiscent of the 1970s when he’d masquerade as a grey-haired old man playing to the gallery. It was phony, but so much fun.

This one’s more 102 and not quite.

A man who is 102 years old and full of life teaches a lesson or two or three for his grouchy 75 year old son. Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor make this father and son melodrama a good watch simply because they deliver. But if you step away from the casting coup, the loud violins that accompany the moralising and the mawkish sentimentality could put you off. Should have been a Sunday afternoon theatrical production, with a family hug afterwards…