The only good thing about Pagalpanti is that it is extremely self-aware. The tagline warns the viewer, “Dimaag mat lagana kyunki inmein hain nahin”. At some point in the film, John Abraham’s character Raj Kishore says, “Yeh zaroori nahin hai ki har cheez ka koi matlab ho”. You can set the bar very low when you walk in to watch this film, but Pagalpanti will beat all your expectations — by setting the bar even lower.

A 165-minute torture fest from start to finish, Pagalpanti is perhaps the film equivalent of a mouth sore. You ignore the signs in the beginning and hope that it will go away, or at least get better. But it only becomes worse and before you know it, it’s graduated into a big, festering mess. While the same is true for most of Anees Bazmee’s films — his last outing Mubarakan had a similar template and inflicted the same amount of pain and torture — Pagalpanti is an altogether different beast. It’s so nonsensical and hare-brained that it doesn’t even fall into the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ category. You will frequently find yourself either passing out in your plex seat, coming to sometimes to gasp for air and longingly eyeing the exit door. On a loop.

A montage of gimmicky scenes — featuring everything from statues coming ‘alive’ to CGI-created lions to a ‘ghost’ breaking into an item number — it’s no surprise that Pagalpanti doesn’t even have the semblance of a script. Inanity abounds, with the principal characters running amuck through London and engaging in loud, physical comedy to elicit some laughter from the audience. Nothing works, not even when Anil Kapoor and Arshad Warsi — actors known for their credible comic timing — walk in to try and salvage matters.

Working on the same ol’ template of three useless pals desperately trying out everything to make a quick buck, Pagalpanti unfolds on a hastily put-together set in London where Raj (John) and his friends Junky (Arshad) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) have attempted everything from dabbling in fireworks to cement. Raj is dismissed as ‘panauti’ or bad luck and has a backstory of losing out on his job in a bank in India after a man called Niraj Modi (Inaamulhaq playing a Nirav Modi-lookalike) defaulted on a loan running into a few thousand crores and decamped to the UK.

The three friends run into self-styled don Raja (Saurabh Shukla) and his brother-in-law WiFi (Anil Kapoor) and find themselves working for them, sometimes as food taster, sometimes as decoy. Reason? Raja and WiFi are scared of being attacked by rival dons who go by the name of Bully bro and Tully bro (no connection to Mark Tully).

Names are, perhaps, the only entertaining bit in Pagalpanti. At one point, Junky and Chandu land up in hospital and are treated by two doctors — one is called Dr Donald, the other Dr Trump.

Written by Bazmee, Praful Parekh and Rajiv Kaul, Pagalpanti goes nowhere. The women, as expected, are incidental and play types. Ileana d’Cruz is the feisty no-nonsense girl constantly rolling her eyes, Kriti Kharbanda is the bimbette dressed like a Barbie doll while Urvashi Rautela has one-and-a-half scenes stitched on to an item number.

Things happen at random in Pagalpanti. A destination wedding in the Middle East pops up in a character’s dream and gives the actors a chance to dress as bedouins and belly dancers and gyrate endlessly. It’s a three-minute song that has no bearing on the plot. Another scene has all the principal characters hitching a ride on a truck that is transporting huge cans of super glue. You know what happens, including sitting through an agonising five minutes of watching Kriti Kharbanda’s lips stuck to Pulkit Samrat’s cheeks.

And then, of course, are the lines. Someone is referred to as “Shamshan ki jali hui lakdi” while another is warned with “Tumhari kidney main apne kutte pe transplant karunga”.

What’s worse is Pagalpanti’s misplaced patriotism, with the last 30 minutes being devoted to the characters pulling out all stops to put “desh ka gaddaar” Niraj Modi — and his Mehul Choksi-lookalike uncle — behind bars. This plays out just after one of the characters is told that even though he’s been living in London all his life, he’s a true Indian at heart. “Kyunki jab Virat 99 pe out hota hai toh aapka mann bhi dukhta hai”.

Some of Bazmee’s films are guilty pleasures for most of us. I will invariably catch at least a few minutes of No Entry whenever it shows on TV and the funeral scene in Welcome is a comedy classic that still makes me LOL. Pagalpanti has John doing the naagin dance step — more than once — in the middle of Trafalgar Square. That alone is worth a thousand nightmares.