The wrong R, Kabir! You got the wrong R. Yash Raj Films stands for Romance, not Reality. You can call yourself Kabir Khan, but Chak De! India doesn’t happen every monsoon.

New York — enjoying the first-mover advantage being the first big release after the producer-plex impasse — is unrealistic, unthrilling, unfunny and pretty much unwatchable.

You can, of course, make out how Yash Raj is desperately seeking safety. Take John Abraham in Dhoom mode — you can’t miss that same Kabir stare in that familiar leather jacket in the billboards — the hit heroine and the new kid on the block and (since it’s a film about terrorism) add a dash of Irrfan for that much-needed touch of credibility.

But New York is anything but credible. The film treats the FBI like some local Mukti Morcha. They know who the terrorist is, have the pictures of his gang mates and when they are hanging from the outside walls of their headquarters, they keep calling their cab-owner mole for information!

To be fair, New York starts off breezily. In Slumdog mode, Irrfan, the “south Asian FBI officer without an accent”, quizzes Omar (Neil) on his terrorist links and he goes back a decade to tell the story of his college friendship with Sam (John) and Maya (Katrina). The buddy bits are fresh and, punctuated with the strains of the catchy Hai junoon song, it’s easy watching three beautiful people having fun.

But the planes had to hit the World Trade Centre and while there’s that lovely little moment of how the national calamity pales in front of Omar’s personal tragedy of losing the girl to the other guy, it’s all downhill from there.

One absurd event follows another and in an effort to tie it all together, New York ends on a note so low you wish you had waited another week before returning to the Bollywood theatres.

When Kabir Khan says that he is allowed to make the kind of films he wants, who is he fooling? What’s the use of having a documentary filmmaker credited as the director of the film when Aditya Chopra is writing the story? How can a man who stays holed up inside a mansion in Juhu like Saddam Hussein understand the intricacies and implications of post-9/11 politics to spin a logical yarn around it? He just changes religion into retaliation as the reason of terrorism and ends up blaming “waqt” for all the meaningless mayhem. This family just refuses to grow up — from one Waqt to another.

And the cast doesn’t help. Neil has the meatier role in Half One and while he is earnest in the first few scenes, his constant whining and that muscle twitching around the lips gets to you after a point of time. John’s the man in the second half, with clothes or without it, and he really tries hard. As long as he is the cool dude with smart one-liners, it’s okay but anything more than that and you are entering trouble turf.

As the carefree college-goer, Katrina looks fetching with her red-streaked hair highlighting that gorgeous face. But you know how Kats can crack you up (in the hee-hee-hee way) in those heavy-duty emotional scenes. And New York unfortunately has too many of them. She really needs to go back around the pyramids with Akshay. It will help them both.

Barring Hai junoon, you wouldn’t remember any of the other tracks by Pritam. Behind the lens, Aseem Mishra does a commendable job, making New York look far more momentous than it is.

Many felt that Kabir’s first film Kabul Express was more of a documentary. But at least it was a human story told with a lot of heart. Sadly none of the two H words — human and heart — have anything to do with New York.

P.S: Rather than wasting 150 minutes of your life, do a YouTube search with the keywords “Sean Penn and 9/11” and watch the 11-minute short directed by the Oscar-winning actor on the September 11 attack. Feel.

If you were to remake New York, what would you do differently? Tell t2@abpmail.com