Life Partner is a moronic and singularly unfunny comedy that left me exhausted and depressed. Rumi Jaffrey, who once wrote serviceable David Dhawan comedies such as Coolie no. 1 and Hero no. 1, gives direction another shot after the equally miserable God Tussi Great Ho. My advice: stick to the day job.

The film features Govinda, Fardeen Khan and Tusshar Kapoor as three friends who live in Cape Town. Govinda is a divorce lawyer. What the other two do doesn’t matter because they spend all their screen time romancing their respective partners and then marrying them. Of course, as the divorce lawyer gleefully predicted, romance sours terribly after marriage. Fardeen’s wife, played by a shrieking Genelia D’Souza, is too demanding. Tusshar’s wife, played by Prachi Desai, is a woman with a mind of her own who refuses to give into the absurd demands made by her father-in-law, otherwise known as a Gujarati Hitler.

Life Partner doesn’t work either as drama or as comedy. The writing is bad, the acting is worse and for reasons, I couldn’t fathom, everyone screams all the time. And then there are the clothes: in one scene, Govinda wears skin-tight black pants and a tight t-shirt, which reveals his bulging chest. It gets worse: in the next scene, he is romancing Amrita Rao, who looks young enough to be his daughter.

I have nothing against brain dead comedies but Life Partner feels more like life imprisonment. It’s an old and tired leftover from the early 1990s. Stay far away.