Last Friday, a group of angsty teenagers gave us a dangerously trippy ride in Shaitan. This Friday, a bunch of precocious 18-year-olds give us a dull yawnathon in Always Kabhi Kabhi.

A bit of High School Musical, a dash of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar and a lot of Glee, Always Kabhi Kabhi is actually a bargain-basement version of the Archie comics, lacking the punch and the panache of any of its inspirations. Boring and banal, with a storyline that packs in too much and yet goes nowhere, Always Kabhi Kabhi is a waste of those 125 minutes of your weekend and those 200 bucks in your pocket.

In the world of Always Kabhi Kabhi, students are meant to do anything but study. Schoolkids wear designer clothes, drive swanky cars, flash iPhones and smoke pot at nightclubs. The only time they attend school is when they have to sing and dance in the corridors or indulge in some PDA (public display of affection, sillies!).

Set in a Riverdale High-inspired school straight out of Archie, Always Kabhi Kabhi traces the lives and loves of four friends. Sameer (Ali Fazal) is the happy-go-lucky Archie, Nandini (Zoa Morani) is the poor little rich girl Veronica, Aishwarya (Giselli Monteiro) is the simple Betty living her life under a cloud and Tariq (Satyajeet Dubey) is Jughead-meets-Reggie-meets-Moose. If the four spend the first half bunking classes and hanging out at coffeeshops and nightclubs, post-interval is dedicated to lashing out at parents and peers, teachers and the education system. The common refrain: “Let us be.”

Student suicides to teenage pregnancy, parental pressure to the pangs of growing up, Always Kabhi Kabhi could have made for a bittersweet tale of teen frustration and the highs and lows of chasing one’s dreams. But though debutant director Roshan Abbas gets it right in parts — giving us a peek into the daily lives of the protagonists through status updates on their social networking accounts is smart and the ploy of taking the narrative forward through the school rehearsals for Romeo & Juliet is novel — he messes it up with a hackneyed plot and an incoherent screenplay. Characters pop in and out at random and stereotypes abound — the English teacher (Lilette Dubey) has to love Shakespeare, the one teaching chemistry (Vijay Raaz) has to look like a deranged scientist and the one who the students target every possible potshot at has to be a Bengali with a Brit accent.

If the film is dull, the songs that pop up like Internet windows are worse. There is one with lyrics that go: Antenna, nahin karta match antenna, one way sunenge kyun yeh lecture FM tumhara! (Shah Rukh Khan grooves to that one. Did we mention he also produces the film?) And there is also a minute-long jingle of a popular orange drink thrown in somewhere in the film.

The performances are as inconsistent as the film. Ali — with a pronounced Zac Efron hangover in hair and histrionics — has screen presence while Zoa shows potential. Satyajeet tries too hard while Giselli has two expressions — smile and smile some more. Lilette Dubey is overbearing while Vijay Raaz sleeps through most of the film.

We didn’t have a choice, having to trudge through knee-deep water on a Friday morning to watch this zzzzzzzzzzzzzz of a movie. You do. Have a choice not to, that is.