Smack in the middle of a spate of releases that experiment with new themes and genres comes Humko Deewana Kar Gaye – an unabashedly masala film. The comedy track, the shaadi, the snowy mountain-top songs all feature in this extravaganza that, like a Walkeshwar auntie in jeans, is old school at heart but is dolled up for today’s audiences.

Aditya Malhotra (Akshay Kumar), a car technician, is promoted and transferred to Canada where he meets Jia (Katrina Kaif). The two bump into each other, literally and repeatedly, until love inevitably blossoms and they spend the night together, singing in Canadian mountains that are passed off as the Himalayas. The hitch is that they’re both already engaged and not to each other. Anil Kapoor, playing Jia’s fiance and business tycoon Karan Oberoi, makes a dishevelled pre-interval entry and Aditya has reason to worry, given all the talk about a newspaper editor who hit on Jia and mysteriously died the following week in an accident. Some minor tension is also added to the script when Jia thinks Aditya has betrayed her.  Eventually, love conquers all and the two jilted fiances are left consoling each other.

With a hackneyed storyline that barely has any original ideas, this overstretched romantic-comedy-drama meanders its way through the first half as a collage of sequences cut and pasted from various English and Hindi films. The second half has a little more conflict, and the plot actually manages to move a couple of inches from time to time. The nadir comes early on in the film, when director Raj Kanwar steals a popular gag that has been forwarded into everyone’s inboxes at some point or the other. The only saving graces are a fairly energetic soundtrack and the magnificently watchable Kaif. Leo Mirani