Pati Patni Aur Woh is boring, lazy and misogynistic.

Pati Patni Aur Woh is a remake of a 1978 classic directed by BR Chopra. The original was celebrated then. But picture this. A married man having an affair with his secretary. In a post-#MeToo and Times Up world, this seems like a thing of the past. Unfortunately, director Mudassar Aziz isn’t convinced, and concocts one of the laziest, most misogynistic and derivative tales to come out of Hindi cinema this year.

Starring Kartik Aaryan, Bhumi Pednekar and Ananya Pandey in lead roles, Pati Patni Aur Woh follows Abhinav/Chintu Tyagi (Kartik Aaryan), a PWD engineer in Kanpur, whose humdrum domestic life with his spunky wife, Vedika (Bhumi Pednekar), leads him to Tapasya Singh (Ananya Pandey), a dreamily Western woman, whose tight clothes and accented Hindi draws Abhinav in. The good thing here is that Tapasya is not his secretary. The problem is everything that follows.

Aziz, who’s also co-written the story, seems content with checking everything off the list of clichés. By setting the film in Kanpur, he gives it a Luka Chuppi meets Badrinath Ki Dulhania-esque vibe. We have loud, domineering parents, houses with open courtyards and even the token Muslim best friend - played by Aparshakti Khurana in both Luka Chuppi and this film. In the original, the secretary is made to believe that her boss’ wife has cancer, thus their affair is justifiable. Here, Mudassar only slightly improves it. Chintu tells Tapasya that his wife is having an affair, to justify their dalliance.

The first half is fun and affable. Mudassar banks off the stellar acting of Bhumi Pednekar, the only actor in this cast that gives it her all. The gags keep coming, and Aparshakti, who’s become Kartik Aaryan and Sidharth Malhotra’s go-to small-town best friend, is reliable. But post interval, the story hits an emotional chord and derails. Sunny Singh makes a brief cameo, involving a ridiculous subplot about a Canadian visa and a wedding. Don’t ask how that makes sense, because I still can’t figure it out.

The problem is both in the story, which has nowhere to go, and the acting performances of Kartik Aaryan and especially Ananya Pandey. Kartik has gotten typecast as the chocolate-boy who perpetually seems to hate women. In Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, which I ranked as one of the worst films of 2018, he played Sonu, a bored best friend who wages war on his friend’s lover. In the considerably worse Pyaar Ka Punchnama, he spewed a misogynistic dialogue about the perils of women. Here, too, Mudassar has the misogyny down pat.

We all know about the balatkaari and marital rape dialogue, but even its alteration in an already problematic sequence doesn’t quite sit right. But the problem is that we’ve seen Kartik do this so many times that the novelty has long worn off. I hope his next films, especially the Imtiaz Ali feature, let him stray further away from this — I believe there’s a good actor in there. But, Ananya Pandey is just so hard to like as Tapasya. Mudassar concocts her as this feverish dream, so she gets the most ridiculous dialogues (which is saying something, since Vedika says, “Ab zamaana kultaon ka hai.”).

I hope there’s a better actor in there, one we got a glimpse of in Student of the Year 2, where she towered above the rest of the cast excellently as Shreya Randhawa. The material in Pati, Patni Aur Woh just doesn’t support her and exposes her limitations further. Here, she’s rigid, uncomfortable and unmistakably foreign to this style of cinema. The words just don’t fall out organically enough. Even if we were to forgive the unhinged climactic resolution that boys will be boys and even the humdrum acting, I have to ask how this film got made.

There’s no story to comment on, some ridiculous lines (Read: “Mere pati chitraheen ho gaye.”) and a climactic cop chase sequence. Mudassar tries, somewhere, to tell a tale about the complexities of human relationships and the crumbling patriarchal structure of small town India.

But, his script and quite frankly, his filmmaking, isn’t smart enough for that. Pati Patni Aur Woh continues the trend of Islamophobic (in one scene, a cop tells Aparshakti’s Muslim character, that as a Muslim, he runs risk of higher chance of encounter), sexist, misogynistic and lazy dialogue.

It’s unfresh and derivative. The only two songs that leave an impact are Dheeme Dheeme and Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare — both remakes. That should give you a hint about the originality on display.