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Patel pretty much plays an imbecile in this movie. The fi rst time we see her on screen, her cellphone goes off at a fairly high-profile courtroom. I didn’t know cell-phones were even allowed inside courts. The last time we see her (she disappears thereafter suddenly) is in a sexy two-piece bikini being fondled by her boyfriend (Saif) underwater. This one is certainly about four children, or so it appears. We’re shown very little of the bratty kids’ past to be able to connect with their present. They are orphans now. Their parents died in a car crash.

A top-shot businessman (Saif), who only picks up awards when he’s not negotiating a take-over deal in America, was responsible for that fatal road accident. He is instructed by the court to look after the children. The kids hate him, which one can understand. They hate everyone else too, which isn’t quite explained. Exactly how a complete turnaround in their attitude takes place is as hard to tell. That may have been the point of this picture. Another could be humour. Seldom have I looked so dispassionately to a screen where antics are meant to make you smile, or laugh.

This is also a fantasy movie about a fairy. Rani Mukherji plays the God’s messenger. She comes down to Earth to make peace between the children and their foster father. She performs a whole lot of magic: things fall, and reappear, and disappear again. And yet, no character ever questions her magical powers. Nobody even knows she’s a fairy. You come out of the fi lm then, having noticed thoughtless visual effects, a fully-paid trip to Los Angeles, and a few stock songs from a Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy compilation.

Those in the know tell me the plot has essentially been borrowed from a ‘70s Rajesh Khanna fi lm Dushman. The premise is straight out of the Mary Poppins series. There is a bit of Sound of Music. Eventually you’re not sure whose perspective this picture is from: merely thoda (little) this; thoda that; trying to please thoda here; thoda there.

The truly original bits I could fi nd is an old Bollywood song-medley; and references to people who work in the movies, the sorts of Malaika Arora, Arbaaz Khan, Suneeta Menon… (no one outside perhaps the director’s social-circle is going to care much for that). I remember another thing that warm gentleman told me at the multiplex the other night, letting me in on his fi lm from its poster:

“You see that house. It’s meant to be in Delhi. We shot the whole thing (at a mansion) in Bangkok.” This is where Saif’s protagonist lives, perennially in his black waist-coat, with a butler who, in his white gloves and boe-tie, looks at the rose and goes, “Shakespeare was right!” “You’ll change your mind about the movie,” the stranger said to me, and left. “I will… hope to,” I told him. Sure.