Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai or The Exhaustion of Modern Masala: When 90s nostalgia turns into cringe

There was a moment while watching Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai when I realised I was no longer watching a comedy. I was watching a time capsule desperately trying to convince itself that nothing has changed.

The film, directed by veteran filmmaker David Dhawan, arrives with all the ingredients of a classic 1990s Bollywood farce: mistaken identities, romantic deception, exaggerated performances, family chaos, and a hero who lies his way from one disaster to another. On paper, it sounds familiar. For audiences who grew up on films such as Biwi No 1 and Haseena Maan Jaayegi, it is clearly designed as a nostalgic throwback.

The problem is that nostalgia only works when it remembers what made the original special. Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai mistakes repetition for revival.

What unfolds is less a celebration of vintage Bollywood comedy and more a reminder of why certain storytelling conventions were left behind.

The central premise revolves around a man juggling a wife, a girlfriend, multiple lies, and increasingly absurd situations. The film expects the audience to laugh at his deception because that is precisely what audiences were encouraged to do in countless comedies of the 1990s. Back then, the genre often treated infidelity, manipulation and dishonesty as harmless comic devices. Heroes lied, women forgave, families reunited, and everyone danced during the end credits.

But cinema does not exist in a vacuum. Audiences evolve alongside society.

Watching a protagonist accidentally get two women pregnant and then spend most of the film avoiding accountability is not mischievous in 2026. It is exhausting.

The film repeatedly positions its hero as a fundamentally decent man because he supposedly does not want his pregnant wife and pregnant girlfriend to experience stress. The screenplay appears convinced that this concern somehow offsets the fact that he created the entire situation through dishonesty in the first place. Rather than confronting the consequences of his actions, the narrative keeps searching for ways to reassure us that he is still the "nice guy".

By the time all the principal characters finally come face to face, accountability remains strangely absent. The emotional fallout is treated as a minor inconvenience rather than the inevitable result of prolonged deception. Even more baffling is the film's ending, which introduces another romantic possibility while the protagonist continues withholding the truth about the existence of his children.

It is difficult to laugh when the joke itself appears unaware of its own implications.

The comedy throughout exists on a razor-thin line between bearable and unbearable. Unfortunately, it spends most of its runtime on the wrong side.

The loudness becomes the joke. Characters shout instead of delivering punchlines. Situations escalate without rhythm. Humour is confused with chaos.

Ironically, the film's funniest moments often come from the performers who seem least interested in forcing the comedy.

Jimmy Shergill emerges as one of the few genuinely watchable presences. He is not particularly performing comedy in the traditional sense. Instead, his character's sincerity and gullibility create humour organically. Watching him become an easy target for manipulation produces more laughs than the film's elaborate comic set-pieces.

Similarly, the dynamic between Mouni Roy and Shergill occasionally offers glimpses of a better film hidden beneath the noise. Their scenes work because they are comparatively restrained. They rely on interaction rather than hysteria. At one point, Roy unexpectedly breaks into a classical dance sequence, a moment that initially feels amusing precisely because of its randomness. Yet even that joke overstays its welcome, a recurring issue throughout the film.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai is that it feels less like a bad comedy and more like a filmmaker refusing to acknowledge that the audience has changed.

Ironically, the most satisfying part of the entire story arrives when the women refuse to choose him.

For perhaps the first time in the film, the narrative stumbles into something resembling honesty. Both women recognise their worth, move forward independently and demonstrate that life without this endlessly dishonest man might actually be preferable. Their decision feels far more modern than anything else in the screenplay.

And that, perhaps, is the accidental lesson of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai.

That is what makes the film significant beyond its individual shortcomings.

For decades, David Dhawan perfected a specific brand of Bollywood entertainment. His comedies thrived in an era when audiences approached cinema differently, when theatrical releases faced limited competition, and when broad slapstick could dominate mainstream culture. Those films belonged to a particular moment in Indian popular cinema.

Trying to recreate that formula today without adapting it is like attempting to use a map from 1999 to navigate a city built in 2026.

Modern audiences still enjoy mass entertainers. The success of contemporary commercial cinema proves that. What viewers increasingly reject is laziness disguised as nostalgia. They want characters who face consequences. They want humour that evolves with the times. They want emotional stakes that feel recognisable rather than relics from another era.

The lesson from Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai is not that Bollywood should abandon masala filmmaking. It is that masala itself must evolve.

A great comedy can still be outrageous, ridiculous and unapologetically entertaining. But it cannot simply photocopy the past and expect the same reaction.

What once felt cheeky now feels immature. What once felt harmless now feels tone-deaf. What once generated laughter now often generates second-hand embarrassment.

If this truly represents the closing chapter of David Dhawan's long career, it functions as an unintended commentary on the state of old-school Bollywood comedy. The audience moved forward. The formula stayed behind.

And somewhere between those two realities lies Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai — a film so committed to recreating the past that it never notices how much the present has changed.