Starring Ajay Devgan, Salman Khan, and Asin. Rated PG. Now playing

London Dreams aims to be an intense portrait of ambition corrupted by narcissism. Instead, it loses its nerve and settles on trite mediocrity.

The film opens in rural Punjab with young Arjun, whose dreams of being a rock star are stifled by his father’s objections. His friend Manjeet comes from a family of musicians but he has no desire to practice despite a natural talent. After the death of his father, his uncle takes the adolescent Arjun to London where he promptly runs away and makes enough money busking with his reed flute to pay his fees at a posh music school. Right.

Cut to the adult Arjun (Ajay Devgan), who finds some success when he forms a band with two Pakistani Brits and a groupie/dancer, Priya (Asin). After a trip back home, he gets the grown-up Manjeet (Salman Khan) to join the band in London. Soon Manjeet begins to eclipse Arjun in the spotlight and in Priya’s heart. Arjun reacts by plotting his friend’s demise.

Devgan is intense and brooding in his role, but he doesn’t have the charisma to pull off a rock star. While the film ventures into some seedy territory, it never goes far enough for us to take it seriously and is then belied with a banal ending that strips the previous two-and-a-half hours of any credibility.

The songs, which are central to this story, aren’t strong enough to have filled Wembley Stadium with a mixed crowd of fans cheering for Hindi music. This film inevitably demands comparisons to last year’s Rock On!! , whose music was also composed by the team of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. There, the performance sequences (where the actors actually sang the tunes) were exhilarating; here, they are dull. Perhaps that’s because Devgan and Khan fail at the first task of any Bollywood actor: lip-synching.