Critics rating: 1 Stars

Cast: Kajol, Shah Rukh Khan, Varun Dhawan, Kriti Sanon

Direction: Rohit Shetty

Produced: Gauri Khan

Written: Yunus Sajawal, Sajid-Farhad

Genre: Action, Drama

Duration: 154 Mins

Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) is sleeping. And then, he isn’t. It’s because Raj had a nightmare. Something about getting shot. You’ve seen it in the trailer. He sweats and pants in his sun-dappled room, the only aesthetic shot the film opens with before flinging you eye-ball first into a world of flashy cars, loud colours, which includes the blue and white house where Raj lives with his little brother Veer (Varun Dhawan). It sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Veer is busy trying to make nice (among other things) with Ishita (Kriti Sanon) in an unconvincing love track sans chemistry because who needs that when you can declare mutual adoration from atop SUVs instead? When he isn’t being electrocuted by her touch, Veer is goofing around with his friend Siddhu (Varun Sharma), who steals his car parts for profit and Veer later remains cool with it despite finding out.

Raj, meanwhile, is the responsible elder brother with a hidden proclivity for retaliatory violence if any harm befalls Veer. That entire sequence is executed with faux maudlin emotion. The rest of the film follows along the same vein, especially in its blaring soundtrack. Expect more of that once Veer and Ishita hit obstacles in their romance, with the key lying in Raj’s past with Meera (Kajol). One could say that the film keeps going downhill if there was a hill to go down. The film is on swampy ground and sinks lower into the quagmire.

There is a rising impatience that is likely to hit the discerning viewer from the first five minutes. Now multiply that with the film’s total running time and no plot.

There are only two scenes where cars really fly through the air as part of the director’s trademark. Any dramatic hurdle to the lovers’ path is really already dealt with in the past. Eventually, it is all about how they clear their misunderstandings and move on together.

That’s all there is to the story. No, really. When the end credits roll and the mandatory song appears, it is what you are left with.

Dilwale is not a rousing love story and does not even begin to serve as a worthy tribute to the SRK-Kajol pairing. Even the subtle violin-playing of ‘tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam’ during one of their meet-cute moments does not make the cut. In a film as lazily written and unimaginatively filmed as this, it should come as no surprise that a sequence between Veer and Ishita is a rip-off of Love Actually’s famous cue card scene. Then, Dilwale tries to throw in movie references and pay homage to the older lead couple by actually cramming in the ‘bade bade deshon mein’ line towards the end.

Mukesh Tiwari’s character Shakti sums it up when he says, “Jahaan shuru hue thay, wahin jaake attke hain.” That is on-point. Because Dilwale is relentless like a bad raconteur in building up an old story everybody has heard umpteen times before. Do yourselves a favour and step away from this session.