In what has now become his customary voiceover opening, Vishal Bhardwaj announces through Charlie’s lisped speech: “Kutton ka baf (bas) ek hi jawab hai — kaminey.” While he never lets the ‘dogs’ out, you cannot help but wonder which films or filmmakers the writer-composer-director wants to answer with Kaminey.

Then again it just might be a challenge he has set for himself. Because Vishal really is on a planet of his own. For the man who made Makdee, Maqbool, Omkara and Blue Umbrella, the benchmark is way too high for other Bollywood makers to even feature in the same ring. If his Kaminey is up against any film at all, it’s his own ones.

Maqbool and Omkara, despite being hailed as great pieces of cinema, hardly made a dent at the box office. With Kaminey, Vishal clearly wants to set the record straight. So, the man goes back to Bollywood’s oldest story — mistaken identity involving twin brothers.

Ironically, this comedy (or tragedy) of errors can also be traced back to Shakespeare, what with Vishal’s mentor Gulzar making Angoor. But Vishal’s judwa journey is much more ambitious. He takes what is really a one-line idea (from a Nairobi guy!) and keeps stretching it like one of those tumbling tumbleweed tales by the Coens and Guy Ritchie. In spirit, Kaminey is very much like the brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and the ex-Mr Madonna’s Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with more and more characters popping up to create a confusing labyrinth.

The first half hour, in fact, can be quite a challenge to follow. Especially the hotel sequence where new baddies and their buddies are introduced simultaneously in different rooms. The chaotic pacing can really throw you off the beat and it is only the Dhan te nan song just before the interval that brings you back on track.

The second half begins with the inter-cutting of two of the best scenes of Kaminey. The stammer and the lisp, which set the twins apart, are way overused in the film but the scene where Guddu is asked to sing by the bad cop just to be coherent and the one in which Charlie explains to Bhope Bhau “main F ko F bolta hoon” are riveting.

Then suddenly for the last couple of reels, Vishal chooses to go emotional. A flaccid back story on why the brotherly love was lost is introduced and the love story creeps back to lead up to the climactic gunfight, which itself is more smoke than fire. The feel-good closure — has producer UTV stepped in again after the laughable Delhi-6 ending? — also betrays what was set up as a deliciously dark drive through kaminapanti.

The script, credited to as many as four people (Supratik Sen, Abhishek Chaubey, Sabrina Dhawan and Vishal), is one of the problems. The characters are far too many and often pointless. Vishal does give life to most of the countless kaminas, at times with just a couple of lines, but you could soon be too bheja fried to care. Also, the serpentine swelling of the story comes across as loopy rather than trippy. You feel that the characters are having a lot more fun than you sitting in the theatre. Two people (Meghna Manchanda and Sreekar Prasad) sharing editing credits adds to the patchy feel of the proceedings.

Shahid Kapur, however, may just make you put up with all that is wrong about Kaminey. In what always seems to be a tricky exercise, the actor actually plays two characters. When Charlie and Guddu come into the same frame for the first time, you never even think about how the visual effects might have been used. Yes, Shahid is just ‘two’ good. And after a long time, a Bollywood actor is asked to do comedy, action, romance, dance and drama in the same film and he excels on all counts.

Priyanka Chopra’s purple patch continues. She not only wears the body language of a Marathi mulgi perfectly, she dives inside the convoluted mind of Sweety just right. If Priyanka is good as Guddu’s love interest, debutant Chandan Roy Sanyal is a knockout as Charlie’s shonamoni. The homoerotic subtext between Mikhail and Charlie is vintage Vishal, teasing you to wonder what these men do after a hard day’s night (and yes, working like a kutta!).

Amole Gupte makes a sinister return to acting, but there is just too much of him. Menacingly kaminey are Tenzing Nima as Tashi (again too much screen time), Shiv Subramanyam as Lobo and Deb Mukherjee as Mujeeb. Rajatava is wasted.

Besides Shahid’s acting, the one other reason to watch Kaminey is Tassaduq Hussain’s lighting. The cinematographer plays around with shade and more shade to create a very postmodern film noir texture. Don’t miss the heady Dhan te nan circular track shot.

Vishal set out to make a very un-Bollywood Bollywood film and while it works in bits and pieces, his sensibilities as a filmmaker come in the way of this masala transition. In an interview Vishal says that it was “very tough” to make Kaminey and he “would never like to make such a film again”. We understand.