Young Banku ( Aman) comes to live in a haunted house in Goa, with his mom ( Juhi). That a Bollywood brat will be called `naughty' by his parents and teachers ( how about, for heaven's sake, a more appropriate word-- `naughty' makes you think of Victorian misses giving their nannies a hard time ) is a given. Fortunately, Banku walks and talks like a real child, not an automated robot with a sing-song voice, so his chirpy tete-a-tetes with Bhootnath ( Amitabh) are amusing, till the novelty starts wearing off.

The film starts off with a smart youthful air, seguing smoothly into the `chaar foot do' lad and the `chhey foot do' bhoot bantering about stars in the sky which are really angels, and cavorting on Goan beaches. Long snatches are spent in Banku's school where a rival needs to be convinced that there is, indeed, a ghost, and a principal who likes gobbling tiffin : but the initial pleasant time-pass feeling, encouraged by the quick edits, gets overpowered when everything starts taking too long.

There are loose ends, unseemly in a well-made film : Rajpal Yadav, who plays a wavering drunk infesting the house suddenly disappears without explanation ( what was he doing there in the first place?); Juhi Chawla's chandelier danglers turn into studs within a sequence, and Amitabh's Bhootnath cleans up his filthy self inexplicably after he's befriended by Banku : do ghosts have to be grubby?

And then it comes: post interval, you discover you've all along been watching `Baghbaan 2.0'-- the poor ol' bhoot is actually just a heart-broken father, who's been let down by a son ( Priyanshu), who upped and left for `videsh', and never came back. Out come the hankies, and the nostrums. It is, after all, a B R Chopra production: unless you can wring tears, it's not really a film, right?