Promising premise, but predictable

Romantic comedies thrive on chaos - misplaced affections, meddling lovers, and the familiar tug of “will they, won’t they?” Shashank Khaitan’s Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari tries to pack all of that into a brightly packaged two-anda-half hours with an ensemble cast headlined by Varun Dhawan, Janhvi Kapoor, Rohit Saraf, and Sanya Malhotra.

- By Manjusha Radhakrishnan

Janhvi Kapoor and Varun Dhawan in Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari.

The premise is promising: what happens when two exes crash the wedding of their former lovers to “save” them from making a supposed mistake? But like most glossy Bollywood romcoms of late, the film hovers somewhere between fun and frivolous, never quite sinking its teeth into its central theme.

The story goes like this: Rohit Saraf and Sanya Malhotra, who play the exes of Janhvi Kapoor’s Tulsi and Varun Dhawan’s Sunny, are set to marry each other. Instead of moving on with dignity, Tulsi and Sunny gatecrash the wedding festivities with a singular agenda - to win their exes back. On paper, that sounds like the stuff of screwball comedy. In execution, however, it raises an eyebrow or two.

Who's more toxic in this equation? The film wisely doesn’t lean too hard into that question, keeping things light and frothy. But the premise itself feels shakier with every passing song-and-dance sequence.