Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

 

 Cinematic universes are hard.  Movies are hard to begin with, but it can be tricky to figure out just how interconnected you want to be.  There's a scale between "basically unrelated movies apart from the odd reference or cameo" and "really really just a series of sequels with pretensions."  So genuinely, credit where credit is due: Alpha (2026) add new characters and concepts to Yash Raj Film's Spy Universe, which does keep it from ending up as "The adventures  of those three guys, and one of them is married to Katrina Kaif," like Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.

 The movie opens with a look at the past of Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), who became the new chief of R&AW at the end of War 2.  It is 1999, and in the aftermath of the Kargill War, Kaul is working with Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol) to create a super soldier to create a super soldier program called Alpha.  Three years later, the first batch of super soldiers is ready, and after a staged demonstration Alpha is approved.

 During the presentation, Fateh mentions that in addition to enhanced strength, speed, and senses, the super soldiers also have heightened healing abilities, and Kaul is paying close attention.  His wife Janaki (Dia Mirza) is pregnant, but that pregnancy is very dangerous due to a congenital heart condition.  Kaul steals a dose of Alpha and secretly doses Janaki, and suddenly the pregnancy is going well and the heart condition seems to have gone away.  And that's when they discover that all of the test subjects have suffered from cerebral hemorrhages.  Including Janaki.

Janaki dies, but the baby has survived.  The Alpha program is shut down.  And that's when Fateh executes one of the classic Bollywood action movie plots; he takes the baby, replacing her with a stillborn child, leaving Kaul devastated and Fateh free to treat the girl, who he names "Sita", as his personal science project.  Sita grows up conflicted but loyal to her adoptive father, who trains her in combat skills while scientist Dr. Varghese (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) draws her blood every week and gives her a guinea pig on her twelfth birthday, which is a bit on the nose.

Years pass.  Sita grows into a skilled assassin.  And after eliminating all of the officials who signed off on Alpha, in a variety of creative ways, she returns to Fateh's base, kills a wave of soldiers, and blows the place up, taking the guinea pig with her.  Fateh isn't home during the attack, but Sita is saving him for last, as she explains to Soldier, the guinea pig.  (I'm going to pretend that Soldier was named after the Bobby Deol movie.)  

 R&AW is assigned to find the killer, and Kaul realizes the connection between the victims.  He tracks down Fateh, who brags about the child kidnapping and reveals that he has shaped Kaul's long lost daughter into a weapon, and Kaul somehow manages to resist punching him in the face.  (At this point; obviously there will be facepunching later.)

 But Kaul has a secret of his own.  Fateh kidnapped Sita before discovering that Janaki actually delivered fraternal twins.  Sita's sister Durga (Sharvari) is living in Spain, using her supersoldier abilities as  an extreme athlete.  Durga has always idolized her lost sister, and when she learns that Sita is alive she's enthusiastic about helping to bring her home.  She flies to India, intending to meet her father at his safehouse in Kashmir, but Sita got there first.

Naturally there's a fight scene.  Also naturally, Sita has already learned that Fateh is a villain, and she's really there to talk to Kaul.  Fateh's men arrive, and Kaul insists on staying behind to cover his daughters' escape.  It's a few days journey to the next safehouse, and  that means the sisters have time to bond a bit.  The next safehouse is also attacked, and the sisters have to battle special forces ninjas with the help of Kabir (Hrithik Roshan).  Kabir is more than capable of keeping up with their super soldier skills, and manages to perform stunts that he couldn't do even in his own movie, but once again he stays to cover their escape because this is only a cameo.

The rest of the plot is pretty straightforward.  Fateh wants to harvest Sita's brain in order to create a stable form of Alpha, but once he realizes who Durga is he realizes that he has a backup.  There are fights, there is family bonding, and the true extent of Fateh's villainy is revealed, leading to Kaul punching him in the face.

 The Spy Universe has played with sci fi elements, including the super virus and jetpack fight in Pathaan, but this is straight up superhero stuff; the movie even bills itself as an origin story.  The action is ramped up as well, and that's actually a problem for the film, since there are so many big ridiculous fights that they start to blend together.  I will say that Alia Bhatt and Sharvani make convincing action heroes.

Alpha definitely falls closer to the War corner of the Spy Universe, with a hero whose loyalties are initially unclear.   It also continues the search for human connection that is the underlying theme of the Spy Universe as a whole, contrasting Kaul's fatherly love with Fateh's cynical manipulation.  That's not the only theme explored, though; the super soldier syndrome is named after toxic masculinity, and Fateh makes it clear that that is not a coincidence.  His ideal soldier is really a hyper macho warrior, able to win wars by being tough and macho and free form any emotional weakness.  And he is proven pretty conclusively wrong about that.

There's a lot that I like in Alpha, but as a whole it's incredibly dour and po-faced.  The concept is great, like a blend of Frankenstein and Seeta Aur Geeta, but it's never quite as fun as that sounds. 

 

 

Nothing Up My Sleeve

 

 Dhoom: 3 (2013) has everything you would expect from an entry in the Dhoom franchise: motorcycles, increasingly improbable stunts, terrible police work, male bonding, and an antihero who completely overshadows the series leads.  It also has a tremendous sense of style and some remarkable performances in this silly, silly movie.

The film opens in 1990 Chicago.  Iqbal Khan (Jackie Shroff) and his son Sahir (Siddharth Nigam) have one chance to impress banker Warren Anderson (Andrew Bicknell) and convince the Western bank of Chicago not to foreclose on their fledgling "Great Indian Circus."  It is a remarkable performance, skilled stage magic mixed with Cirque du Soliel style acrobatics, but Anderson is not impressed, because it's not dumb enough.  He explains that circuses are stupid, and people only want to see stupid things.  This is Sahir's villain origin story, so there's really only one way it can end.  Iqbal takes his own life, and Sahir is left (almost) alone and very, very angry.

Years pass.  Sahir (now played by Aamir Khan) is about to reopen the Great Indian Circus, but he has other interests; he's been pulling off spectacular bank jobs, breaking into branches of the Western Bank of Chicago, throwing the money at the crowd, and then escaping through a combination of parkour and genuinely ridiculous motorcycle stunts.  That may be why the Western Bank of Chicago and/or the Chicago PD decide to call in Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan), India's leading motorcycle detective.

Jai naturally brings along his sidekick Ali (Uday Chopra), motorcycle mechanic turned annoying police officer.  They are met at the airport by Chicago PD's Victoria Williams (Tabrett Bethel) and because she is blonde and attractive Uday immediately starts objectifying her despite Jai urging him to act like a professional.

Sahir has been searching for the perfect leading lady for the circus, and that is why nerdy Aaliya (Katrina Kaif) barges in and demands a chance to audition.  Sahir offers her five minutes, and warns that if he looks away for a second it's over.  She delivers a performance straight out of All That Jazz, with added acrobatics.  Naturally, she gets the job.

Jai sets a trap for Sahir, appearing on television to dare the mysterious bank robber to rob again.  Sahir responds by going to meet Jai as himself, claiming to be a concerned citizen with a circus background who once worked with an embittered clown who knew how to vanish from one location and appear in another.  And Jai lets him join in on the planning, even sharing security codes with the civilian he just met.  You might think this is part of a cunning plan on Jai's part, but he's just bad at his job.

sahir strikes again, using his inside knowledge, and escapes with an even more ridiculous motorcycle stunt.  Jai follows in a helicopter and shoots into traffic, wounding Sahir on the shoulder, then realizes that the civilian he gave the access codes to must be the one who used them. He goes to the circus and confronts Sahir, demanding to see his wounded shoulder.  The shoulder is not wounded, Jai is humiliated, and he and Ali are kicked off the case.  (Naturally they keep working the case, because they are maverick cops.)

There's a trick.  The trick is Sahir's identical and autistic twin brother Samar, who has been kept hidden since before Iqbal died for the sake of the act.  Sahir and Samar can perform amazing feats of misdirection since no one knows there are two of them, and that is also really helpful when fleeing the scene of a crime.  Samar is onboard with committing crimes to avenge his father, but he is his own person with his own interests.  He loves spending Sundays out in the world by himself, and he loves Aaliya, who does not know the secret and has no idea that she's been performing with two different men all this time.  Sahir and Samar have a close bond, at least until Jai accidentally discovers that Samar exists and sets out to exploit that.

The action in the Dhoom series escalates from movie to movie, and Dhoom 3 adds gadgets.  Samar's and Sahir's motorcycles are tricked out Bond-style, with impractical grapple guns and the ability to convert to jet skis.  Like the other Dhoom movies, this is a very male world, and Jai's wife Sweety (played in the earlier movies by Rimi Sen) doesn't even get mentioned.  Jai's important relationships are all with men; he's exasperated with Ali, feels betrayed by Sahir, and betrays Samar in turn.  (He does feel terrible about it.)  Ali is a bit creepy around Victoria, but it doesn't go anywhere.  There is some genuine feeling behind Samar's relationship with Aaliya, though.

Dhoom 3 does have two advantages over the previous film, though.  The first is Aamir Khan, Bollywood's "Mr. Perfectionist," who is incapable of phoning in a performance, no matter how ridiculous the movie is.  He acts the hell out of both his characters, and it lifts the film.

The second advantage comes from a simple syllogism.  The movie is set in Chicago.  Bob Fosse co-wrote and choreographed the musical Chicago.  Therefore Dhoom 3 should channel Fosse whenever possible. Aaliya's sizzling audition scene and the movie's opening tap number are clearly Fosse inspired, but there are touches of Fosse sprinkled throughout all the dances, and Sahir spends most of the movie wearing a bowler hat.  It's not the most Fosse thing I've seen come out of Bollywod (that would be the song "Jab Bhi Ciggaret" from the movie No Smoking,) but it does give the movie a strong and distinctive style that the other Dhooms lack.

Eight months of winter.

 

 Tum Bin II (2016) is a loose sequel to the 2001 romantic drama Tum Bin.  It's a very loose sequel, sharing similar themes, some character names, and one small cameo by a recurring character, but those themes make this a throwback to the kind of sweeping romantic drama that ruled Bollywood in the late 90s and early 2000s.  

 Taran (Neha Sharma) and Amar (Aashim Gulati) are a young engaged couple enjoying a skiing holiday in the Alps.  Well, Amar is enjoying it; he's a passionate skier, but Taran doesn't care for the sport.  Still, they have time for a quick love song before Amar goes out skiing alone, is nearly hit by a snowmobile, and falls off a cliff.  When Amar doesn't come back for dinner, Taran calls his father (Kanwaljit Singh), who immediately flies out to join the search for his son.  After nine days, the authorities decide that Amar is obviously dead, and they promise to call Taran if the body is recovered.  Taran and her would-be father in law return home to Scotland to mourn.

If you've ever seen a Bollywood movie, and especially if that movie was Deewana, you  probably suspect that Amar is actually alive.  And you're right, Amar survived the fall and is being cared for by nuns nearby.  He is in a convenient coma, so no one knows who he is and the rest of the plot has a chance to happen.

 Taran mourns for months, and then there's a ray of light in the darkness.  Amar's father introduces her to Shekhar (Aditya Seal), the son of his old friend.  Shekhar has recently lost his own father, and he's had time to process that loss and develop a philosophy about facing your fears and embracing life and love while you still can.  He's happy to share that philosophy with others, and Taran slowly realizes that she just might be ready to listen.  (Shekhar has a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, really; he has an anecdote for every situation, with a tidy moral to go with it.  He's very wise, probably.)

 Taran's dream is to open a patisserie shop, and Shekhar happens to know a great chef living in London, so they drive through the mountains from Edinburgh to London (Bollywood geography at its finest).  The meeting goes well, Taran is happy for once, she drinks too much champagne, and then she goes on a Magic Pixie Dream Rampage, running through the streets with a bottle in her hand.  For a moment she feels like there's hope.

 

 (The sequence is set in London, but was clearly filmed in Edinburgh; I know Victoria Street when I see it.  But that's only fair when so many of the Edinburgh scenes are obviously filmed in Glasgow.)

Shekhar is kind, patient and wise, and Taran can't help but be drawn to him him.  She also can't help feeling guilty about that, but all of her friends and family love Shekhar and think that he can make her happy.  Finally, one of his life lessons ends with a kiss, and finally, eight months after losing Amar, Taran is ready to move on.  And that's when Amar shows up.

This is a Bollywood movie about a love triangle, so there will be tears and speeches and everyone will act nobly and somebody is going to give up the woman he loves so that she can finally be happy.  The triangle is a bit undercut, though, because Amar is so underdeveloped as a character.  We barely get to meet him before he falls off a cliff, and after his return he is earnest and noble and doesn't have much of a personality, while Shekhar is full of anecdotes and inspirational quotes about living your best life and carpeing the diem, and he's hiding a secret that will change everything.  The triangle isn't really balanced, it's scalene rather than isosceles, let alone equilateral.

Still, the movie is a solid weepy if you're in the mood for that sort of thing. 

All You Need Is Cash

 

 The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978) is a documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the Prefab Four, Liverpool's favorite sons, the Rutles.  Any resemblance to a real0world supergroup from the 1960s is entirely intentional.  I think the real message here is that it's easier to tell a coherent story about the rise and fall of the Beatles when they aren't real.

 

Eric Idle plays . . . well, Eric Idle plays a lot of parts in this, but he plays the Narrator, a documentarian chronicling the early days of the band.  Band members include Dirk McQuickly (Idle), Ron Nasty (Neil Innes), Stig O'Hara (Ricky Fataar), and Barry Wom (John Halsey), whose real name is of course Barrington Womble.  It is quickly obvious who is supposed to be who; Dirk is Paul, Nasty is John, Stig ("The Quiet One") is George, and Barry ("The Noisy One") is Ringo.  The boys meet in Liverpool, form a band, and after sharpening their act in Hamburg, they are discovered by music entrepreneur Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler.)  The band becomes a huge hit, the idols of millions, and soon they are being chased around Britain and America by hordes of screaming girls.

All of which sounds very straightforward, and it is.  There are absurd moments in this section of the movie; Fifth Rutle Leppo Sitoncliff (Ollie Halsall) is last seen in Der Rat Keller in Hamburg, climbing into a small trunk with a smaller German woman.  But things get much weirder when the Rutles start making their own movies.  "A Hard Day's Rut" is just A Hard Day's Night with a silly title, "Ouch!" manages to be even more problematic than Help!, and "The Tragical History Tour" is . . . from the clip we see, the experience of watching "The Tragical History Tour" is almost exactly the same as watching The Magical Mystery Tour.  Some things are beyond parody. And, the little we see of "Yellow Submarine Sandwich" is more surreal and considerably less coherent than Yellow Submarine.

 The band begins to fall apart, gradually and then all at once.  The group[ establishes an organization called Rutle Corps, an apparently charitable organization which immediately loses enormous amounts of money, despite (or perhaps because of) the efforts of brutal promoter Ron Decline (John Belushi).  Stig is drawn to Arthur Sultan, the Surrey Mystic (Henry Woolf).  And Dirk and Nasty both get married.  Dirk falls for French actress Martini (Bianca Jagger), who is barely a parody of Linda McCartney at all.   Nasty is captivated by German conceptual artist Chastity (Gwen Taylor), who is strongly implied to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler, but at least nobody but Mick Jagger (Mick Jagger) blames her for breaking up the band.  (Apparently Yoko Ono found the character hilarious, so I won't quibble.)

All You Need is Cash is packed with celebrity cameos, particularly Saturday Night Live alumni; it's always nice to see Gilda rRdner.  It's the cameo by actual factual George Harrison as an interviewer asking questions about Stig being attacked by the Hell's Angels in the basement that is the real get, though, putting the mockumentary one Beatle ahead of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 This is a comedy.  It's full of surreal humor and whimsical asides, which is fitting, considering Idle's career and the movies the Beatles made themselves.  It's also surprisingly more coherent than the history of the Beatles.  Reality doesn't have to be realistic, but little tweaks like having the death rumors be centered on Stig/George rather than Paul make a lot more sense.

 

The family that steals together, heals together.

 

 Con City (2026) opens with an ordinary family suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances.  Saravana (Arjun Das) runs a small restaurant with his wife Mithra (Anna Ben).  There is obviously tension in the relationship, but they stay together in order to take care of their wheelchair-bound seven year old son Jeeva (Akhilan), with Mithra's brother Jackie (Yogi Babu) and mother Janaki (Vadivukkarasi) helping with both home and business.  One day Saravana is late picking up Jeeva from school, and by the time he arrives someone else has taken the boy.  Nobody knows who this person is . . . until the family gets a good look at the CCTV footage, and the whole family immediately recognizes the perpetrator.

The film skips back seven years, when the family wasn't ordinary or even a family yet.  Saravana is working for the power company while quietly struggling to repay the loans his mother took out years ago.  Mithra is alone and pregnant, and only discovers that she's been the victim of a real estate scam when she's thrown out of the house she thought she leased.  Jackie is an aspiring actor hoping to fulfill his late father's dreams when he discovers that Janaki has cancer and needs a great deal of money for an operation, and soon.

And so they all make questionable choices.  Saravana begins skimming payments at the power company, then funnels the money through his stockbroker friend Satha (Sathanand) to create a pyramid scheme.  Mithra begins a real estate scheme of her own, and she turns out to be really good at it.  And Jackie and Janaki receive enough money in donations through the charitable trust established by Jackie's father (a former stuntman) to pay for Janaki's operation, only to discover that the doctor is incompetent and she's fine.  Janaki insists that they keep the money and use it to fund Jackie's debut film; he doesn't want to, but she's his mother, so he agrees.

Mithra, Jackie and Janaki all invest their money with Saravana.  Saravana invests the money with his childhood friend Sabari, who promises a large return after a smuggling deal.  But Sabari is killed, everyone's cons manage to collapse at once, and the characters are all brought in by the ferocious police inspector Sundaram (Nanda Gopal).   Sundaram wants to know where the money is, and uses all the police brutality at his disposal to find out, but everyone tells him the truth and he does not believe them.  When it becomes clear that he plans to arrange for them to be killed in "an encounter," Saravana masterminds a jailbreak, and the group stays together; the others are hoping that Saravana will eventually lead them to the money.

Back to the present.  The man on the video taking Jeeva away is Sundaram.  He's found them.  Saravana insists on going back home and turning himself in, hoping that Sundaram will release Jeeva and let the others go.  The others insist on coming along.  But Sundaram is no longer a policeman, he's retired, with a bad gambling habit. He doesn't want them arrested, he wants them working for him, and he reveals that he let them escape; he's been quietly returning criminals to the wild for years, so that he can make use of their talents later.  

This is a con artist movie, so there are schemes within schemes and it's not clear who is playing who until the very end.  It's not the most devious plotting I've ever seen on film, but everything more or less hangs together and the big reveal at the end makes sense.

However the movie is not entirely focused on the cons.  It's also about the fake family evolving into a found family, and learning to trust and rely on each other.  They also manage to avoid the obvious romantic track, at the end Saravana and Mithra are getting along better, and may have moved to a real relationship, but they're still primarily together for the sake of the kid.  It's both refreshing and sensible, since the script doesn't really have room for romance on top of everything else. 

Ram Jaane

 

 Shah Rukh Khan may be the King of Romance, but he's played plenty of baddies over the years, including his fair share of brutal but charming gangsters.  Ram Jaane (1995) is an early example of Khan-as-gangster, and it's remarkable just how much it feels like a commentary on Khan's role in the Don franchise, despite being made more than a decade earlier.

The movie starts with an orphan nicknamed "Footpath" living on the street.  Footpath is even more orphaned than his best friend and fellow orphan Murli; Murli has a name and a shirt, while Footpath just has a nice hat.  The boy asks the village priest (Arun Ali) when he will finally be given a name, and the old man sadly replies "Ram Jaane" - God only knows, in other words.  The kid knows a good name when he hears it.

Murli and the newly christened Ram are friends with neighborhood girl Bela, and by friends I mean that they are both deeply smitten with her. She goes to school, but the boys spend their time committing minor crimes, then graduate to stealing from a train.  They're quickly spotted, though, and while running away Murli falls on the tracks.  Ram saves him, but that slows him down enough that he's caught by the brutal policeman Chewte (Puneet Issar), who is not shy about beating children.  

Ram is sent to reform school, but escapes along the way and makes his way back to Murli, who is now wearing a school uniform.  Murli explains that the priest has given him a chance to go straight, while Bela has been sent away to a hostel to study and become a fine lady who will marry a rich man.  All Ram Jaane can focus on is "Bela will marry a rich man," so he goes to work for the gangster Sameer Sanavla (Tinnu Anand).

Years pass.  Ram is now played by Shah Rukh Khan, and he's become Sanavla's top enforcer, though he still doesn't seem to own a shirt.  He is very good at his job, killing the henchmen of rival gang lord Mirchi (Amritpal) with style and an inordinate number of puns.  there's a problem, though; fellow gangster Pannu (Pankaj Kapur) is upset about being overshadowed by Ram, and possibly also about being nicknamed "Technicolor".  Pannu strikes a deal with Mirchi, arranging for an ambush at the end of Ram's Batman-themed musical number.  Ram manages to kill all of the attacking gangsters as well as Mirchi, but just as the last man falls, Inspector Chewte arrives and shoots Sanalva.  Ram attempts to kill Chewte, but he's overwhelmed by a large number of policemen, arrested, and sent to prison for four years.  

When he gets out Ram is placed in the custody of Murli (Vivek Mushran), who now runs an unlicensed orphanage.  Bela (Juhi Chawla) is a frequent visitor, and has not married a rich man.  She is also clearly in love with Murli, though Ram sees what he wants to see.

When Ram was sent to prison, Pannu promised him money and a share of the business when he got out.  Ram is ready to collect, but Pannu doesn't want to pay, and he is now in business with Bhau (Gulshan Grover) and thinks he'll be safe.  He is not safe.  Ram forces his way into he business by stealing bank records Pannu was responsible for keeping, and manages to cheerfully survive all of Bhau and Pannu's attempts to kill him.  

Meanwhile, Murli wants to save his friend's soul, but he's also worried about how much the boys at the orphanage look up to Ram.  He should be worried, since Ram has started using some of the boys to assist in his crimes.  And Bela just wants Murli to admit his feelings.

Things come to a head when corrupt businessman Baweja (G.P. Singh) hires Bhau to clear out the land the orphanage sits on, and Ram solves the problem by assassinating Baweja.  Everybody knows that Ram is responsible, so Chewte "investigates" by going to the orphanage and threatening childre.  Murli intervenes, and the situation escalates further when the boys start throwing things at the police.  Chewte retailates by shooting a fourteen year old in the head, then walks away.  Murli blames Ram, and Ram leaves, though he does stop long enough to beg Bela to go with him.And that's when Murli comes up with his worst idea ever: he asks, then begs, then emotionally blackmails Bela into agreeing to date Ram, hoping that that will be enough to reform him.  Unfortunately, while he loves Bela, Ram is still an awful person, and it does not solve the problem that he's too damned cool to be around impressionable youth.

Despite the similar career and general bravado, Ram Jaane is a very different character than Don.  Don is smooth, stylish, and always in control, while Ram is a bundle of anger who lives by instinct.  Don is always five steps ahead of the opposition, while Ram is one, maybe two steps ahead and makes up the difference with charm and improvisation.  

However, both characters leverage Khan's effortless charisma, and in fact the central problem in Ram Jaane is that Ram is too damned cool.  That's because this is actually a surprisingly faithful remake of the 1938 movie Angels With Dirty Faces, with Khan in the Jimmy Cagney role.  There's an added focus on the love triangle, but I am never going to say no to more Juhi Chawla.

Bhooth Bangla

 

 There have been more vampires than usual in Bollywood lately, but Bhooth Bangla (2026) is not a vampire movie.  Sure, the villainous Vadhusur skulks in darkness, commands a literal army of bats, owns a castle that the protagonists inherit, and turns one of the comic relief characters into a knockoff Renfield, but he draws the line at drinking blood. Not a vampire, he just stole Orlok's look.

Meanwhile, Arjun (Akshay Kumar) has a problem.  His much younger sister Meera (Mithala Palkar) is engaged to the bland but handsome Rahul (Perin Malde), but Rahul's family astrologer keeps making more and more demands for the ceremony.  Meera has already had to marry a tree, and now Arjun is having trouble finding a wedding venue that will pass astrological muster.

And then a lawyer (Alexx O'Nell) shows up with some good news: Arjun and Meera's grandfather, Dushant Acharya (Rajesh Sharma) is dead!  The siblings didn't know that they had a grandfather, but he has died and left Meera a fortune and a palace in northern India.  The money's nice, but a palace is a wedding venue that they don't have to pay for, so Arjun leaves their London home and flies to India to check the place out.

When Arjun arrives he meets the palace caretaker, Shantaram (Asrani), who explains that the palace is haunted and cursed, complete with the requisite mysterious locked room that must never be opened under any circumstances.  In fact the entire village of Mangalpur is cursed, as the demon Vadhusur won't permit any brides in the area; he carries away newlywed women and kills any other members of the wedding party he can catch.  (Vadhusur has a complicated backstory to explain his actions; the short version is that he's half god, half demon, cast into darkness because of his mixed heritage, and his war against the gods ended when a divine nymph with lightning powers married him in order to get close enough to stab him.  vadhusur needs to sacrifice thirteen brides to bring him back to full life, and they have collected twelve so far.)

 Arjun doesn't really believe in the curse and it's a free venue, so the wedding is on, and wedding planner Jagdish (Paresh Rawal) arrives to get the palace into shape, bringing a small group of employees including his own nephew Balli (Rajpal Yadav.)  And then mildly spooky stuff starts to happen, but the first half of the film is largely devoted to the comedy part of horror comedy, and far too many of the gags involve Arjun hitting Balli or Jagdish repeatedly burning his backside in a series of improbable accidents.  

Probably the most important thing that happens in this part of the film is that Arjun is electrocuted in another improbable  accident and revived by Priya (Wamiqa Gabbi), a writer who happened to be passing by while researching local legends.  Except that Priya is actually trying to find her missing twin sister Chitra, who vanished on the way to her wedding.  Arjun and Priya hit it off, and she promises to return in time for the wedding.  And the next day he spots Priya, dressed in a sari, and she seems surprised that he can see her.  The flirting intensifies.

The haunting also intensifies, and even Arjun has to admit that something's wrong, especially when a friendly monk who was visiting to check the palace for soirits is killed in by flying debris during a sudden storm. Arjun finally manages ton get in touch with his father  Vasudev (Jisshu Sengupta), who tells him all about the curse.  Arjun tries to cancel the wedding, but Meera arrives, accompanied by Rahul's family.  Rather than explain things to his sister, Arjun decides that the wedding is back on, leading to further shenanigans as he tries to keep his sister's wedding on track while protecting everyone from the ghost.  

 There are some obvious similarities to the Bhool Bhulaiyaa series, including the haunted palace, the forbidden room, and most of the cast.  There are some significant differences, though; the plot is drawn more from old Ramsay Brothers movies than the pure ghost stories you see in the Bhools Bhulaiyaa, and the balance of horror and comedy is different, with incredibly broad physical comedy in the first half followed by some genuinely effective action scenes and real scary moments in the second half.  I kind of get why; the supporting cast are veteran comedians and they are given a chance to trot out some of their classic material, but I just don't find hitting Rajpal Yadav very funny, and it makes Arjun come across as really unlikable.  

The movie picks up considerably when it stops being a comedy, and the scene of Arjun menaced by Vadhusur, with light as his only weapon, is genuinely well done.  And while the plot is very predictable, it's also well crafted and holds together well.  For me movie's real flaw is that Tabu is really underused; she makes a cameo appearance in an extended flashback, and she is always wonderful.  I would have liked more.