Director: Shaad Ali Sahgal

Abhishek as a fast-talking con artist. Again. Preity as a butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth-haughty miss. Again. In a film where nothing much goes on, except a bit of bouncy backchat, a few glib one-liners, and oh yes, scads of bright costumery, scintillating scenery, and frantic frippery: that’s the sum total of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

Shaad Ali Sahgal steals a couple of ideas from an old Hollywood movie (two people meet at a railway station, and create backstories to ward off attraction). He lifts his hero from his earlier hit (Abhishek is a Punjabi from Southhall here, not the UP ka chhora from Bunty aur Babli), but same difference.

So this is what we get: a crowded London station, Abhishek and Preity toying with their sandwiches, trying desperately to appear disinterested, Bobby Deol cocking a Cockney snook, innit, and Lara Dutta faking, very passably, a French accent. We get an impossibly-long stretch limo, a fancy thirty-room mansion, a luxe hotel, a dance sequence-with-a-hundred-extras in front of the Eiffel Tower, and a couple of pretty Parisian boulevards.

We also get a movie which is all about The Look. Each character is designed within an inch of their lives. Abhishek is all hoodies, tees, and facial hair. Preity does short skirts like they were going out fashion. Lara wears her cleavage on her sleeve. Bobby is resplendent in curls and velvet jackets and stubble. And Amitabh, the journeyman-wayfarer- sutradhar is so OTT, he’s almost classy, in his techni-coloured dreamcoat, a Tyrolean hat, feather sticking out at a jaunty angle, and a double-barreled guitar. There’s so much to be dazzled with, who needs a story?

It’s possible to be surface and slick and barrels of fun, but for that you need to be inventive and do new. Window-dressing is not enough. Shaad Ali’s Bareilly-Bahraich conceits in Bunty aur Babli may have been fake, but they hung by a tale, his characters had verve, and he lucked out with Kajara re, which rapidly turned into a huge global Bollywood anthem . Jhoom Barabar Jhoom’s lack of a plot is exacerbated by the oh-no-not-that-again feeling.