Chashme Baddoor

Rajul Tyagi's *Chashme Baddoor* is a pleasant enough comedy that understands the assignment: deliver laughs without pretension, and it mostly succeeds. The three leads—Siddharth, Ali Fazal, and Shardul Bhardwaj—have decent chemistry and play off each other's stupidity with genuine charm, even if the writing never asks them to dig deeper than surface-level buffoonery. The Goa setting provides a breezy backdrop, and the film's central conceit—three broke friends and their escalating lies about love—taps into relatable male desperation. Where Tyagi falters, however, is in the execution: the humor relies too heavily on slapstick and forced misunderstandings rather than wit, and the female characters, particularly Seema, are written as props in the boys' games rather than actual people with agency or complexity. Taapsee Pannu does what she can with undercooked material, but even her screen presence can't elevate dialogue that treats her as a conquest rather than a character.

The film's biggest sin isn't that it's dumb—comedies can be gloriously dumb—it's that it's lazy. There's potential in exploring how male friendships crumble under romantic jealousy, or how desperation breeds delusion, but Tyagi opts instead for the safe, predictable route: escalating hijinks followed by a convenient resolution that asks nothing of anyone involved. The third act in particular feels rushed, as if the screenplay ran out of steam and just wanted to get to the end credits. It's serviceable, crowd-