This is misleading, confusing, vague… it’s unintelligible!” sputters Sachin Khedekar’s overexcited lawyer character at one point in the new Rustom, offering what I’d say is a pretty on-point summary of the film he’s in. The Tinu Suresh Desai-directed feature is based on the real-life story of KM Nanavati, an Indian naval commander who had shot his wife’s lover, Prem Ahuja, in 1959, but despite having confessed to the crime, was actually acquitted by a jury thanks to the kind of public support that was drummed up for him via a persistent media campaign. Not only did the case raise already-simmering tensions between Nanavati’s fellow Parsis and Ahuja’s Sindhi community, but it also led the government in India to dissolve trials by jury; the officer was later retried in the Bombay High Court and convicted, and jailed for three years, following which he was pardoned.

If that doesn’t sound like fodder enough for a snazzy period thriller, I don’t know what will. There have already been two film adaptations of the story, 1963’s Yeh Rastey Hain Pyaar Ke, with Sunil Dutt and Leela Naidu, and the 1973 Vinod Khanna-starrer Achanak, as well as various books written on the subject. And given that Desai—whose last directorial venture was a none-too-memorable third instalment of the 1920 horror series released earlier this year—had managed to rope in Akshay Kumar, Hindi cinema’s tricolour-waving patriot du jour, this should’ve really been a cakewalk. But Desai and writer Vipul Rawal inject so much unnecessary melodrama into the screenplay, trying so hard to up the ante when it comes to heft and intrigue, that the story actually ends up less impactful than it would’ve been with a straighter, less-embellished telling. What with the too-smug, almost-farcical solemnity of the proceedings and the painfully clunky acting, Rustom comes out feeling rather like a very, very, very protracted episode of CID. Really, if Daya were to have shown up at any point to batter down a door, I don’t think anyone would have been surprised.

The film is set in the then-Bombay of the late 1950s, where we’re introduced to dashing naval officer Rustom Pavri (Kumar) of squeaky-clean repute, who has returned home early from a six-month assignment on the seas and is keen to reunite with wife Cynthia (Ileana D’Cruz). Unfortunately, the lady of the house is nowhere to be seen, and when a suspicious Rustom rifles around the bedroom for any clues as to where she might be, he discovers a pile of love letters addressed to her from businessman Vikram Makhija (Arjan Bajwa), with whom, it is soon clear, she has been spending a lot of intimate time. Calmly, without fanfare, Rustom heads out to acquire a gun, locate Vikram, and shoot him three times in the chest, after which he swiftly turns himself into the police. Pretty much open-and-shut, you’d think. Not so fast, though. While Vikram’s sister, the sultry Preeti (Esha Gupta), is just eager to have Rustom behind bars and justice served, investigating officer Vincent Lobo (Pavan Raj Malhotra) is certain there’s more to the case than the crime of passion it appears to be on the surface. Meanwhile, Rustom is being tried in court—where, for some reason, he suddenly decides to plead innocent and defend himself. And there is also a crass newspaperman (Kumud Mishra) who uses all the power vested in him by the tabloid gods to rally the public, particularly the Parsi community, to side with Rustom, painting him as a decent, upright man who had actually done an honourable thing in killing such a remorseless cad, but had just chosen the wrong path.

Kumar essays the main character reliably enough, although, given that what he’s been asked to do here is maintain a dead face for most of the film, it’s not really the sort of “performance” to gush over. Malhotra is another good casting call; his Lobo is possibly the most believable of all the people onscreen. The rest, however, fall wellshort: there are few scenes where D’Cruz can be found doing anything besides blubbering; Gupta, one hand ever occupied with a cigarette, is unintentionally hilarious as a clichéd, old-timey vamp; and there are a surfeit of others I don’t particularly feel like recalling in detail, but who give the collective impression of having stumbled off the sets of a generic Hindi soap opera where that brand of hammy, exaggerated acting would be far less conspicuous.

The first third of the film is rushed—it practically sprints through Rustom and Cynthia’s romance, their marriage, the cracks that appear in their relationship thanks to his frequent absence, his discovery of the affair, and the shooting, establishing very little of the stakes along the way—almost as if it can’t wait to get into the police/courtroom procedural that takes up the remainder of the running time. Unfortunately, even when it does get to that point, the results are uninspired, more a patchwork of derivative elements of what Desai and Rawal believe crime thrillers should look and sound like rather than an original vision. There are the policemen who throw around stock phrases like, “You are contaminating the evidence!”, the judge who yells, “Order, order!” every few seconds like a charm, and a chess-game analogy that really should be banned from films in general for how often it’s used.

This means that despite straddling a number of promising issues—the fallibility and unreliability of the justice system and the excesses of tabloid journalism among them—Rustom doesn’t really delve into any of these to any substantial measure, happy to skim the surface and coast on formula. Dialogues and interactions are wooden, artificial, often laughably so. And the addition of a rather bizarre conspiracy angle to Nanavati’s story feels like a cheap way to pander to nationalistic punters, serving to further sap the protagonist of complexity and garble whatever message the film is trying to proffer. Also strange is the thoroughly uncynical and regressive characterisation of women as oversimplified “types”, the sort we used to see in Hindi films of yore. Although there is an implicit acknowledgement of female sexual desire in the very fact of Cynthia’s indiscretions, the film shies away from any significant digging into what could’ve been an interesting subject, reducing her to a weak, whiny puddle of tears, to be slotted right back into the good books once she has satisfactorily atoned for her sins, allowed no nuance in between. Preeti is treated even worse, clothed in nothing but generic tart-chic and a single bitchy expression, seemingly existing for no other reason but to raise Cynthia in our estimation.

And it doesn’t end there. Among Rustom’s other problems is the too-clean production design that, despite the antique-y filter and retro memorabilia and costumes scattered around the frames, just doesn’t feel authentic at its core. We also have an overenthusiastic background score that tries to drum up tension when there just isn’t any to go around. And so on and so forth. Rustom is okay for an afternoon watch on TV when there’s nothing else going on, but is hardly deserving of a trek to the theatre.