The familiar premise gets a fresh coat of paint in ‘Fukrey’, with a new spin on some old clichés. While individual scenes inspire laughs, the film doesn’t quite fly because there are too many gags and not enough plot.

This may be a new film, but it is certainly not madly novel. Delhi Belly had the same idea with the addition of some excrement and expletives, minus one fukra.

Formulas in Hindi films, no matter how popular or timeless, have been known to run their course in due time. So it comes as a mild disappointment when a film co-produced by Akhtar, a film that looked so promising on paper, fails to deliver.

Fukrey works in parts and some of them are really funny, but overall it feels like an exercise in wanting to be a little bit of everything. It sounds like Delhi Belly, looks like Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and somewhere in between struggles to make its own identity.

As someone who went loaded with expectations, I did not see any honesty in the shallow plot hurriedly translated into a movie. With shabbily etched out characters and their largely flimsy issues, it is the lack of adequate depth in the story that digs its grave.

Fukrey caters the standard package of bromance that has been hot among Bolly buffs. It looked wild in the promos. Not the same can be said of the film itself. Fukrey would have worked better if the screenplay revealed more imagination.