Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.

 Shahid Kapoor is a fine actor, and probably my favorite cinematic Hamlet.  He didn't spring into being as a full fledged respected thespian, though - Kapoor's first film appearance was as a background dancer, and he's had a complicated career.  For every Jab We Met there's been a Fool N Final, for every Fida there's been a Dora and Diego's 4-D Adventure Catch That Robot Butterfly (no, I am not kidding) and for every Haider there has been a Phata Poster Nikhla Hero (2013.)

Usually when a movie starts with its aspiring actor hero making a dramatic entrance and beating up a large crowd of violent criminals, it's a dream, and probably a dream about a film shoot.  Vishwas Rao (Shahid Kapoor), on the other hand, actually beats people up.  He's a natural action hero, because his mother Savitri (Padmini Kolhapure) has always dreamed of her son becoming a policeman, and when he was a child she made sure he was trained in martial arts specifically so that he could fight large groups of attackers.  

Savitri is a rickshaw driver who respects the law and has a powerful sense of justice, stemming form her tragic backstory involving Yashwanth (Mukesh Tiwari), who was her husband, Vishwas's father, and a spectacularly corrupt policeman who apparently died while fleeing angry villagers.  This will be important later.

Vishwas adores his mother, but he's an aspiring actor, not an aspiring policeman, and he deliberately blows every interview Savitri arranges.  Finally she pulls some strings and arranges for an interview in Mumbai, and Vishwas agrees to go because it's Mumbai, center of the film industry.

 

Once in town Vishwas meets Guruji (Sanjay Mishra), an unsuccessful writer with connections to the industry.  Guruji sends him to get some proper pictures taken, and a chain of farcical events leads to Vishwas riding home on a borrowed scooter while wearing a borrowed police uniform.  That's when he meets Kajal (Ileana D'Cruz), a social worker known to the police as "Complaint Kajal" for her annoying tendency to notice crimes and ask them to do something about it.  Kajal has spotted a kidnapping, and she spots Vishwas just in time and sends him in hot pursuit.  The crooks are confused because they've paid off Inspector Ghorpande (Zakir Hussein), so the police should be leaving them alone.  Vishwas arrives at the right time, and when the crooks try to drive him off, he beats them all up, saving the kidnapped girl in the process.

Vishwas and Kajal keep meeting by accident, and she keeps dragging him off to stop crimes in progress.  Thanks to his fighting skills and flair for the dramatic, Vishwas becomes a highly successful accidental vigilante, leading crimelord Gundappa (Saurabh Shukla) to demand that Ghorpande find this mysterious and effective new policeman before the enigmatic international criminal mastermind Napoleon (he's the Moriarty of Crime!) arrives to begin Operation White Elephant.

That's not nearly complicated enough, though, so the Joint Commissioner of Police Shivanand Khare (Darshan Jariwala), who is not corrupt, also wants to find the strangely effective newcomer.  And after spotting a picture of Vishwas in uniform in the newspaper, Savitri insists on coming to Mumbai to see him work, so Guruji and a few other friends borrow a scheme from Munnabhai, M.B.B.S. (deliberately - Vishwas specifically mentions the movie) and put up an elaborate front to fool her into thinking that her son really is a police officer.  It only has to last for three days, so what could go wrong?

The charade falls apart almost as completely as Munna's fake hospital did.  When she discovers the truth, Savitri confronts her wayward son and then collapses from Sudden Onset Bollywood Mystery Disease.  The doctor tells Vishwas that she will need an operation, and he'd better be prepared to pay one million rupees, or his mother will die.  And that's when Gundappa appears with a simple offer - he'll pay for the operation if Vishwas will retrieve a CD with a secret message from Napoleon from onstage at a dance festival.  

After the obligatory dance number, Vishwas retrieves the CD, then Khare's honest police appear and try to get their hands on it.  In the ensuing scuffle, two policemen are shot dead, leaving Vishwas a wanted man with no apparent choice but to join Gundappa's gang.  Of course, not everything is as it appears . . .

Phata Poster Nikhla Hero is a spoof of nineties Bollwood action comedies, and it's quite open about it.  Vishwas points out the plotpoints lifted from Munnabhai and Amitabh Bachchan's Don, and at the end of the movie he ticks off all the filmi tropes he's lived through.  However, a good spoof is an example of the thing it's spoofing, and this is a good spoof.  (Also, those movies were pretty silly to begin with.)  The movie follows established tropes, but it commits tot hem, and it executes them well.

The supporting cast is good - Shukla has an air of affable menace, Kolhapure is an excellent filmi mom and adds a hefty dose of melodrama to everything she says, and D'Cruz gives a very Juhi Chawla role her own spin.  But this is absolutely Shahid Kapoor's movie.  He's got all the charm and filial piety you'd expect from the hero of one of these movies, but between the dramatic plot twists and the fact that Vishwas is an actor, Kapoor manages to display a surprising amount of range for such a light and fluffy part.  It's no Hamlet, but it wasn't meant to be.