Crook says: It’s good to be bad. After labouring through 140 minutes of this Emraan Hashmi film, we know that the tagline was coined after the makers saw the final rushes. But Crook is so bad that it’s, er, bad. Boring and bland, illogical and irritating to downright stupid in parts, Crook is not the kind of film that should figure on your pre-Puja movie-watching list.

From the perils of pornography in Kalyug, to the psyche of the suicide bomber in Dhokha to the mechanics of match-fixing in Jannat to the mass destruction caused by the Mumbai floods in Tum Mile, topical issues tempered with a Bolly flavour sum up the Bhatt brothers’s recent filmography. So much so that when the racial attacks against Indians Down Under grabbed headlines, you almost knew what the next one from the Bhatt stable would be about. Crook may have its heart in the right place, but is so mundane in its storytelling that the end result is a muddled mess. And that’s putting it mildly.

The biggest problem with Crook is that it isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. It starts off as the story of a small-time crook with a penchant for trouble, wastes the first half on a romantic track that seems to be going nowhere and side stories that only prolong the pain, suddenly develops into a commentary on racism and ends with a twist so simplistic that it leaves you cringing.

Murder to Aksar, Gangster to Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai, playing the enfant terrible isn’t really rocket science for Emraan Hashmi. Here, he is Jay Dixit, a small-timer making a living out of pirating films who suddenly zips off to Australia to begin a new life. On touchdown, Jay (now Suraj as his fake passport claims), sets his sights on Suhani (Neha Sharma) and begins pursuing her relentlessly. After moving into an Indian neighbourhood (the tacky sets have tandoori chicken barbecuing and kachhas set out to dry in the middle of the road!), Suraj becomes a cabbie to sustain himself. Drinking binges, long nights at strip clubs and the occasional shacking up with a gori, all is well for Suraj. But when he gets embroiled in the racism issue, Suraj finds his hopes of permanent residency ebbing. Bad boy turns good, callousness gives away to responsibility as Suraj joins hands with Suhani to end the bloodbath on the streets of Melbourne.

Crook treats the issue of racism too superficially to register any kind of impact. The love story is too half-baked and the comic moments range between the inane and the irritating. Add to that the racial stereotyping that the film itself suffers from — Australians guzzle beer all day long and Indians mean only Punjabis.

The half-hearted performances don’t help. Newcomer Neha has screen presence, but the only thing that you take back after coming out of the movie hall are the various shades of lipstick she sports. Arjan Bajwa — Priyanka Chopra’s live-in boyfriend in Fashion — hams it up till you get a headache while Gulshan Grover has exactly two scenes and two expressions.

Emraan sleepwalks through a role that he, well, can sleepwalk through and yet is the only watchable thing about Crook. And yes, there is the obligatory kiss — but with the phirang babe. (Kya kare, as Neha told t2, she “doesn’t want to go through it!”)

Pritam’s music is as ordinary as ordinary can get. It doesn’t really help that the background score screams out bad, bad, bad (no, not the MJ number) every time Emraan appears on screen!