It’s loud and it’s tasteless and I’ve heard it before.

When you’re working in a genre as formulaic as the Bollywood action movie, you have a few choices. You can subvert the formula, and try and create something new. You can follow the formula and hope that no one notices. Or, like Tashan (2008), you can embrace the formula, celebrate the cliches, and see where that takes you.

Jimmy Cliff (Saif Ali Khan) is a call center worker and English teacher blessed with style, grace, a succession of interchangeable girlfriends, and a skeezey mustache. And then she walks into his life: Pooja Singh (Kareena Kapoor), bright, charming, shy, very traditional, and interested in private tuition. Instantly smitten, Jimmy agrees.

Unfortunately, Pooja is not the student. She’s representing Bhaiyyaji (Anil Kapoor), a flamboyant businessman from Uttar Pradesh who wnats to impress a visiting foreign delegation. After a month’s work, Bhaiyyaji has made a little progress with his English, and Jimmy has made considerable progress with Pooja.

It soon becomes clear, even to Jimmy, that Bhaiyyaji is not just a businessman, and Pooja is not just an employee. Finally, she explains that she was sold to Bhaiyyaji in order to pay off her dead father’s debt, and so the pair resolve to intercept one of Bhaiyyaji’s cash shipments, pay him back with his own money, and then disappear together. They take the money, but before they have the chance to run, the chance to do anything, really, Jimmy is called back to the call center to meet with the police, where he learns that Bhaiyyaji is in fact a powerful crimelord with a reputation for gleeful and totally gratuitous brutality.

Enter Bachchan Pande (Akshay Kumar), a swaggering petty gangster with a talent for finding people, and perhaps the only character in the movie who is quite what he claims to be. The movie shifts into roadtrip mode, as Bachchan and Jimmy cross India looking for Pooja, and then the three of them drive around the country to retrieve the money.

It’s like every buddy movie ever made, except that one of the buddies will shoot the others in the head if they don’t manage to bond sufficiently. And of course it all ends in a literally explosive and completely over-the-top, heavily choreographed climactic gun battle in Bhaiyyaji’s sprawling lair/water park. (It has to be a water park. That’s the only possible way to explain the jet ski.)

Normally I worry about spoiling the ending of a movie, but the plot and characters of Tashan are so conventional that you can figure out how it ends just by looking at a movie poster. While the story being told is entirely conventional, though, the storytelling isn’t. With its liberal use of flashbacks, soliloquy, and multiple narrators, the movie doesn’t just break through the fourth wall, it backs over it a few times just to make sure it’s good and dead.

Despite the art film flourishes, Tashan isn’t an examination of the big dumb Bollywood action movie, it’s a celebration of it. The movie is filled with things which may not be good, but are awesome.