If you have diabetes or cholesterol, avoid Dil Bole Hadippa!. For others, the movie has an abundance of ghee and ganne ka ras — no, we aren’t talking about Rakhi Sawant and Sherlyn Chopra — to make a sumptuous (loud and melodramatic, if you are in the other team) start to your festive season.

Dil Bole Hadippa! packs in India’s greatest passions in one 150-minute movie. It has cricket, that too in T20 format. It has Punjab, which has become the password to sureshot success, from Jab We Met to Singh is Kinng. It has Indo-Pak diplomacy, right at the Wagah border! It has love-shove romance-shomance, featuring an all-new pair — one a happening hero, one a heroine desperate to be back in business. And, of course, it has the flavour of the season Rakhi Sawant. (Thankfully, she is there for just a song and little more.)

So, just like Veera disguises as Veer to get into the men’s cricket team, Hadippa! (story, screenplay, dialogues credited to Jaya-Aparajita) is actually many films in disguise, ensuring that some chord or the other — patriotic to romantic — touches you.

Not all films can pull off such a trick. Especially the ones where characters glue moustaches and beards on faces and lo, no one can recognise them. Just like that. From Rab Ne’s Suri to Hadippa!’s Veera. And the voices too never ring a bell. Just like Fanaa.

Yes, it’s that Yash Raj nonchalance which brings many films packed with potential crashing down. Why does a film which is essentially about a girl posing as a guy have to include “mitti ki khushboo ki ehmiyat ka ehsaas”?

You get the plot, right? Veera (Rani) gets into London-returned Rohan’s (Shahid) Indian Tigers cricket team to beat Pakistani Champs and helps him help his father win the Aman Cup. And you know all this within the first 15 minutes of the film.

So there’s no point wasting your money and time on Dil Bole Hadippa!, right? Well, not exactly. Because Rani and Shahid are in crackling form. From the first time they meet on the truck to the first day of selection to every moment thereafter, whether it’s he and she or he and she as he, they are quite electric.

What makes the romance between the Buffalo Girl and the Vilayti Launda more interesting is the clash of interests between Veer and Veera. He just wants to play the game and she wants to be with Rohan. And since mixing the two becomes, er, a practical problem, Veera actually encourages another girl (Sherlyn Chopra) to woo Rohan so that Veer can just play cricket. That’s the only unpredictable bit in a formula-filled exercise.

The other surprise is Rani the cricketer. For someone who has never liked the game and only picked up the bat for the movie, she is not bad at all. She has got a very settled stance for a start. While most of the shots are bottom-handed, she plays the pull quite perfectly. She can switch-hit, too, Kevin Pietersen style.

And in the acting game, she is the Rani of old. Just like we had loved her in Bunty Aur Babli. Veera is an upgraded version of Babli, with rustic ways along with her broken English making her quite irresistible. As Shahid’s Rohan puts it, mar jaawaan jalebi khaake!

As Veer, She’s The Man (the Amanda Bynes film from where the man-woman-sport concept is loosely borrowed)! Rani’s eyes, with black contact lenses to make the distinction, do all the talking as she struggles in the men’s dressing room, as she struggles through the fitness drills, as she struggles to deal with Rohan’s moves on Veera.

Shahid is good, yet again, and as a now-mature actor he never steals the spotlight from Rani, who is clearly the hero of the film. The only complaint is that often, perhaps unknowingly, he slips into Jab We Met mode and starts talking like Aditya Kashyap.

Hadippa! deserved a better soundtrack. Pritam, who has mustered many a Punjabi chartbuster, is not in form here with only the title track having some recall. Sudeep Chatterjee, who also shot Chak De! India, shoots cricket matches and big bhangra dance sequences with equal aplomb.

If you are in a ‘jokey’ festive mood, your dil can well bole hadippa but beware of the overdose of every emotion in the book. Over and above everything else, the film gifts us the sizzling pair of Rani and Shahid. Just like the first time when they had faced the camera together for a Pepsi ad, all we want to say is yeh dil maange more!