Shaandaar, Zabardast, Zindabad. Wish I could have repeated this dialogue from MANJHI to describe this movie. This is neither Shaandaar nor zabardast. It's just fluff! Ok. Picture this and you just might understand what this movie is all about: Once an empty truck half filled with bricks ran over a dead cat and almost killed it. Early in the morning in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight. They fought fist to fist; each of them removed a gun and shot each other!

Third time's the harm - that could be an expression for Vikas Bahl. After delivering delightful films such as Chillar Party and Queen, we were understandably excited about his third endeavor Shaandaar, which was anything but. It bears no resemblance to the fine stories that he has narrated in the past with a strong story line - quite contrarily, it is a patchwork of sorts by a scatterbrain.

Vikas Bahl's Shaandaar has the backing of several creative minds so people were pinning high hopes from the film but it disappoints at multiple level. Promoted as India's first wedding destination film, Shaandaar suffers from shoddily animated sequences, incoherent storytelling and lack of editing. Shandaar tells the story of two wealthy families who arrange a business deal under the garb of a marriage. Bipin's (Pankaj Kapoor ) plump daughter Ishaa (Sanaa kapoor) is getting married to a bare chested moron from a Sindhi family at a regal castle in Europe.

There are good films, there are bad films, there are good films that you want to hate and there are bad films that you want to love. Shaandaar is the film you want to like, desperately too. The themes and the ideas at work in this movie are truly nice. But there are too many things happening all at once. It's as if the director is trying almost too hard to please everything and everyone.

The very idea of cinema as confection is a fine one, for we could all occasionally use a soothing lozenge as an opiate, and some films are meant to shine with candied gloss and a whole lot of far-too-bright frosting. Shaandaar is director Vikas Bahl's attempt at harmless, meaningless, utterly frothy cinema, more toffee-making than filmmaking, and he gets a great cast in place and polishes them up with rags made of thousand-rupee notes. This is a movie about bling more than it is a movie about characters or story, and while glamour in itself is a perfectly pleasurable ideal, there isn't much here besides the shine.

When Vikas Bahl had made the highly entertaining yet touching Queen, the industry welcomed him with open arms and waited for the talented director to serve up another fresh and delicious offering. However, though Shaandaar might be fresh with regards to the visuals, delicious it is not. Starring Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Pankaj Kapur, Sanjay Kapoor and others, Shaandaar comes across as a fairy tale trying its best to be accepted by adults.

Even though there have been many films which have been made on the theme of weddings in Bollywood, there has never been a movie that dealt with the concept of destination wedding. This week's release SHAANDAAR is one such film that treads on the never-before attempted theme of destination wedding.

Shaandaar has a fun plot. However in his attempt to spoof destination weddings of the bankrupt and the famous, Vikas Bahl, (who also directed that gem, Queen) forgot to take a script along. You can defend the director's indulgence or even forgive him for borrowing Tarantino's Kill-Bill, part-animation, part-live narrative style to tell you the tale of an orphan girl who is given shelter by an affluent businessman, Bipin (Pankaj Kapur). The tycoon's harridan mum (Sushma Seth) and ambitious wife (Nikki Aneja) do not take a shine to the child.

What do you call a film that seems so dizzy-headed that it doesn't know where it is headed, or wait, perhaps so sure of itself that takes a strut towards that forbidden area of superiority complex? It takes two long hours (which feels longer) for one to gauge which category 'Shaandaar' falls into. But by the end of it, you stop caring.

Alia (Alia Bhatt) is an orphan whom Bipin (Pankaj Kapur) takes home but his oppressing mother and snooty wife are against it. Alia is least concerned about their hatred towards her since she just wants her Bips (as she fondly calls her father) and his daughter Isha (Sanah Kapoor) to herself. But there is something about her that worries Bipin, Alia is an insomniac and he prays for a person who can make her sleep. But when that man arrives in the form of Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor), he doesn't like it at all. Bipin keeps an eye on him.

The big fat Indian wedding on which Vikas Bahl's Shaandaar hinges is as breezy and boisterous as any that has ever been conjured up by Bollywood. But there is one marked difference here - the rituals go offshore, and off-kilter, in quest of untapped locations - and bursts of hilarity. In Shaandaar, the free-wheeling qualities of a modern-day fable meet the flamboyant and filmi flights of a KJo romance.

Take a blank canvas. Daub some 'Orphan Annie' paint on it. Add a little dash of 'Cinderella'. Come closer home and borrow from that old durable 'Hum Aapke Hain Kaun', and the much more recent 'Dum Laga Ke Haisha'. And gild the whole with glitter and gold. What 'Shaandaar' is trying to do is clear: reinvent beloved fairytales with the help of winsome stars, but ends up being a blinding mix of everything with nothing of its own to boast of.

Under normal circumstances, you'd think that when three of the four people credited with having written Queen join hands again, the film they'll make will be fun and clever. When they've been entrusted with a big budget and lavish settings, you'd expect a film that's fabulous. Shaandaar proves that these assumptions are wildly off-base. It turns out that the message that prefaced episodes of The X-Files were bang on the money: Trust no one.

Director Vikas Bahl's Shaandaar--promoted as India's first destination wedding film--relies more on the youthful appeal of its lead actors than a tight screenplay. Sometimes, it pretends to raise an issue, but then shies away from dealing with it. Let me introduce you to the basic premise of the film which mistakes Sindhis for a community of money minded devils.