Starring Ajay Devgan, Ayesha Takia, and Arshad Warsi. Rated PG.

Oh, what a painful and mind boggling Sunday. This Bollywood puffery is an ill-conceived mess that has absolutely no direction.

The New Delhi–set farce opens with a murder. Who did it? Is there a serial killer on the loose? Damned if the filmmakers care, because for them it’s just a convenient plot device on which to hang multiple story lines and a cast of indifferent characters.

Seher (Ayesha Takia) is a cute-as-a-Barbie-doll voice specialist who dubs Indian and foreign animation shows in Hindi. After a night out at the local dance club, she wakes up with a headache, unable to remember the past 24 hours (the Sunday of the title).

Although Seher’s story forms the central premise of Sunday, director Rohit Shetty goes off on several tangents to kill time. There’s the Delhi top cop Rajvir Randhva (Ajay Devgan), who becomes a love interest and prearranged suitor for our plucky heroine. There are also two buffoonish characters: a tourist cabbie (Arshad Warsi) and his actor friend (Irfan Khan), who both keep running into our damsel in distress and demanding an outstanding fare of 420 rupees. There are also hoodlums trying to kill her, but they’re as inept as their leader, a squeaky-voiced freak. The explanation for this nonsense makes about as much sense as Britney Spears’s British accent.

Shetty has a talented cast—including Khan, who had sizable parts in two acclaimed Hollywood films (The Namesake and A Mighty Heart)—but he wastes them with a bad script and lampoonish characters.