The film seems to have been made at a cut-price budget. Posh hotel rooms are suggested with labels pinned on hastily to doors that probably belong to a lodge. The Thai outdoors come on towards the end in a breathless and quite absurd climax on top of a bridge where a starlet falls to her death.

'Short Kut' works neither as burlesque nor high-action.

Ennui is often a poor replacement in the plot for episodic splendour. Arshad Warsi's tongue-in-cheek performance as the cheesy superstar holds the plot together. But not long enough for us to forget that 'Short Kut' is trying to be funny when the characters are far from comfortable in the zany zone that they never quite own.

And what pray are Sanjay Dutt and Anil Kapoor doing in one of the tackiest item songs one has seen in recent times?

The makers of 'Short Kut' don't even know how to spell 'cut' let alone cut the film into a shape that can be considered entertaining, let alone enticing.