The pattern of Akshay Kumar comedies till now, has been a little predictable — the bumbling hero, the stylish heroine, some pulsating music, cheesy humour and a super stylish hip hop track at the end of the film. However, you usually came out laughing.

But Chandni Chowk… takes you back to very old Govinda comedies with an annoying Shakti Kapoor cracking bawdy jokes, and songs as imaginative as Sarkai liyo khatiya… In fact Chandni Chowk outdoes that. In a certain, supposedly funny/romantic sequence, hero Siddhu tells his lady love, ‘Don’t stop me… my entire body is made of iron now’ and heroine looks as pleased as you would have been if you won a million dollar lottery. Ugh!

Saki (Deepika Padukone Indian) religiously takes to wearing Chinese dresses, the moment she is reunited with her father, a Chinese inspector. The inspector father, again, had turned mad, lost his memory but not his knowledge of Hindi, after he fell off the Great Wall of China. Again, he needs no car crash, slimy villain with an iron rod to get his memory back and updated – he needs a tame picture of babies to recognise his 20-year-old daughter. Suzy ( Deepika Padukone Chinese) is probably the only ‘Chinese’ girl in the frame with such an overdose of Chinese bangs. Suzy, pastes a plastic sheath on her lips and applies a lipstick-like red chemical, which breaks glass, chars cloth but doesn’t have its way with plastic. These are the never-heard-of ideas that Chandni Chowk… proposes.

Now for the clichés. Mother to the Padukones dies after Father is pushed off the Great Wall. Destiny awaits only the deserving, and the hardworking, says the Dada with a golden heart – Mithun Chakraborty. Chinese Baddie, who deals in millions, smuggles drugs and diamonds, for some weird reason likes terrifying a small hamlet only. We wonder if he had grown up idolizing Gabbar Singh! Hero’s name has to be chanted in a chorus for him to get up and make jelly, oops aloo ka paratha here, out of villain. Heroine stands in a corner and weeps, simpers and weeps some more as hero gets beaten up. And finally how can you leave aside as strategic a location as the Great Wall of China, without shaking it up with a loud, supposedly heart wrenching but effectively ear piercing Bollywood scream?