Starring Shahid Kapur, Priyanka Chopra, and Amol Gupte. Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj. Rated 14A. Now playing at the Granville 7 and Strawberry Hill theatres.

Kaminey is supposed to be Bollywood heartthrob Shahid Kapur’s coming-out party—a step up from his candy-romance popcorn flicks to more mature cinema, in which Bollywood tries so very intently to be Hollywood (yet again).

While Kapur does get to flex his acting muscles, the film is a typical crime caper in the vein of Lucky Number Slevin. It’s the kind of movie in which every criminal, from kingpins to corrupt cops and politicians, all try to outdo each other for drugs and money, but mostly it’s an exercise in monotony.

Kapur, all cut with washboard abs, plays diametrically opposite twins Charlie and Guddu. Charlie is the fast-running, hard-playing petty criminal who works the Mumbai horse track, fixing races with a trio of Bengali underworld brothers. The bookish Guddu on the other hand has a future, with a series of four-year plans detailing his upward mobility. Everything’s mapped out for him until his girlfriend Sweety (Priyanka Chopra) derails things with sudden news of a pregnancy from their condomless night of drunken sex.

The twins’ world turns upside down when Charlie steals a guitar full of cocaine from some crooked cops working for crime boss Tashi (Tenzing Nima), and Guddu finds out that the girl he impregnated is the sister of an immoral local Marathi politician Bhope (Amol Gupte), who hates non-Marathis. From there, the twins are hunted down, beaten, and nearly killed, all leading to an easily foreseeable showdown.

Composer-writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj, who previously made the Shakespeare-inspired films Omkara and Maqbool, tries too hard to create coolness and kinetic energy through fast cuts and dizzying handheld camera angles. Unfortunately, the predictable story, packed with too many stock criminal characters, begins to weigh down the drama as it limps to its bloody climax.