Forced to give a Secret Santa gift to your office nemesis? Is there someone who did you wrong this year and you want to avenge before the year runs out? Just get them tickets for Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus starring Ranveer Singh; they’ll never mess with you again.

When you hear that Shetty is teaming up with Ranveer Singh for a comedy film you expect, at the least, a few stitches in the side. You’ll get the stitches alright, only they will be on your head, either because your Significant Other has coshed you on the head with their bag for making him or her watch it, or from banging your head on the seat in front of you if you are alone.

Cirkus, Shetty’s take on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, is not a comedy because it doesn’t surprise even one laugh, and watching it is an error of judgement because you will never get those 138 minutes of your life back. Seriously! How can a film, which has some of the best comedians in the industry, and a live wire like Ranveer Singh as a cherry on top, fall so flat? The dialogues are lazy and the jokes fail to land every single time.

The story is about two sets of twins who are swapped by Roy (Murali Sharma), a doctor, as a social experiment — yes, it is a Rohit Shetty film with a message — before they are adopted by two sets of parents from an orphanage in Bangalore. Both sets of twins are named Roy and Joy after the heads of the orphanage. One set goes to a Circus owner in Ooty, let’s call them Roy 1 and Joy 1 and the other to a wealthy family in Bangalore, who we will call Roy 2 and Joy 2.

The point of this experiment is the old nature versus nurture debate, and the original Roy wants to prove that parvarish wins over khoon.

As they grow older Roy 1 (Ranveer Singh) discovers a superpower — he can withstand enormous amounts of current — and becomes the main act of the circus, known as the Electric Man. Only, every time Roy 1 does his trick, Roy 2 (Ranveer Singh) starts wriggling like a Shammi Kapoor on steroids. Joy 1 and Joy 2 (Varun Sharma) are supposed to be equal parts of the experiment but end up being sidekicks to Roy 1 and Roy 2.

Now, Roy 1 is married to Mala (Pooja Hegde) but doesn’t want to adopt a child despite her not being able to have a child, because khoon matters. Roy 2 is wooing Bindu (Jacqueline Fernandez) whose father, Rai Bahadur (Sanjay Mishra), is an absolute twat. The errors begin (the comedy doesn’t) when Roy 2 and Joy 2 head to Ooty for a business deal and are followed by Bindu’s father.

Ranveer Singh seems as enthusiastic about his roles as one would be about a root canal, and plays them with such one-dimensional aplomb that you are left wondering why he even bothered to turn up. He has zero chemistry with Varun Sharma and things are worse when it comes to his leading ladies (though leading is hardly the adjective that can be used here). Sanjay Mishra speaks at such volume and with so much mannerism that you want to beg the theatre to bring the volume down. Even Johnny Lever fails to liven things up. The only thing that comes close to being animated is Deepika Padukone in her cameo dance number, Current Lage Re.

Unfortunately one has to see the disaster unfold in super saturation with garish colours that hurt the brain even worse than the plot-less, humourless story. And is it so necessary to make every scene look like it has been shot on a set painted by an artist on acid?

So, in the giving spirit of the season, don’t subject your loved ones to this torture. And if the torture is intentional, look no further.