Take the last train to Chennai.

Chennai Express (2013) is a deliberate throwback to Shah Rukh Khan's early career.  In fact, it's a throwback to a very specific period in Shah Rukh's career: roughly 1997, when he was making goofy romantic action comedies with Juhi Chawla.  (Not appearing in this film: Juhi Chawla.)

Khan plays Rahul Mithalwala, a forty year old bachelor, orphaned at a young age and raised by loving, but meddling grandparents (Lekh Tandon and Kamini Kaushal).  Rahul wants to take a vacation in Goa with his idiot friends, but his plans are derailed when his grandfather dies suddenly, and his grandmother asks him to immerse part of his grandfather's ashes in Rameswaram, which is at the southern end of India and very far from Goa.

However, one of the idiot friends points out that both Goa and Rameswaram touch the ocean, so anything immersed at Goa will reach Rameswaram eventually, right?  Rahul agrees, because he's very early in his character arc, and makes plans to take the Chennai Express to nearby Kalyan, meet his idiot friends there, then drive with them to Goa.  

It's a pretty bad plan, and it crumbles almost immediately once the train reaches Kalyan.  Rahul realizes that he's left the ashes on the train.  he retrieves them, but spots a beautiful woman running for the train, so he helps her board, DDLJ style.  Then he spots four large and scary looking men running for the train so he helps them board, also DDLJ style.  (It's funny if you've seen a lot of nineties Bollywood, and is probably moderately amusing otherwise.)

The woman is Meenalochni Azhagusundaram (Deepika Padukone), or Meenamma for short.  The men work for her father, Durgeshwara "Durgesh" Azhagusundaram (Sathyaraj), a crimelord with a great deal of power and influence in South India, and they were in the process of kidnapping Meenamma and bringing her home to her father so that she can be forced to marry Tangaballi (Nikitin Dheer).  And because at this point Rahul has seen too much, he is now also kidnapped.

The pair are brought to Meenamma's home village, and paraded before her father.  Meenamma claims that she and Rahul are in love and want to get marries, so that they don't kill him immediately.  Rahul nods in agreement, because he doesn't speak Tamil.  And then . . . well, it's not a very complicated plot.  Tangaballi threatens Rahul.  They escape.  They bicker.  They spend some time posing as a newlywed couple in the Village of Nice People, which gives them the chance to really get to know one another.  And it all leads to a dramatic confrontation which is probably a bit more violent than you'd expect from a 1997 Shah Rukh  movie, but Chennai Express was directed by Rohit Shetty, who also directed Singham.  

The plot is obviously very different, but the emotional beats reminded me of Yes Boss, in which a deeply flawed man named Rahul is forced by circumstance to pretend to be married to a young woman, they fall in love and grow increasingly uncomfortable with the deception, and Rahul doesn't just get the girl in the end, he becomes a significantly better person in the process.  It's an old formula, but it works.