The script has been tailored to accommodate the lewd; sorry, lead's porn backdrop.So when the film crew visits the same haunted house where the first Ragini film unfolded (why make the same mistake twice?!), Sunny, all voluptuous and popping all over the place, fakes an orgasm and tells an obnoxious fellow actor that porn actresses too can act.

They sure can. Sunny, in her third Bollywood film, puts in quite an effort to look possessed by an evilchudail. To be fair to this fornicating fraulein on an image-mending binge, the last half-hour finds her going into convulsions of terror. It's a climactic performance that pines to tell us that porn stars can act.

Point made. Sunny is always good with climaxes. We can now move to the rest of the film which slithers through the hall of absurdity with a terrifying nonchalance. We have characters deliberately moving deeper and deeper into the darkest shadows of the haunting house inviting sure death.If you are so dumb as to go into empty rooms with creaky doors, then you might as well be dead.

Why are the characters in our horror films so intellectually challenged? Ragini MMS 2 is specially suffused with morons. There is a hammy television actor who takes a naked shower with Sunny (once a porn star) and then later jerks off in bed. He is so gross because guys in the Ragini series are destined to be just that. 

In Ragini MMS 1, Rajkummar Rao dragged his girlfriend to a haunted house to shoot a dirty MMS with her. In this instalment, there is an over-the-top film director (the talented Parvin Dabas) who wants to make a 'horrex' (a blend of horror and sex, much the same as the director of Ragini MMS 2).

Ragini MMS 2 is so enamoured by its luscious leading lady's lusty past that it doesn't know what it wants to be. Neither horrifying nor sexy, the film is like a conflicted schizophrenic seeking a closure to his identity crisis blocking out the sunlight from all the windows in his home and running around in circles all over his darkened home.

Watching Ragini MMS 2 is like playing Russian Roulette with the lights off. You know someone is pulling the trigger and trying to fire random shots at unidentified victims. Every trick from the horror genre is brought into use. By the time Divya Dutta is brought in as the latest avatar of Max von Sydow from The Exorcist, the devil is too far gone to be tamed.

And I don't mean the chudail in this film.

Sid(dharth) Roy (Akhtar) and Trisha Mallik (Balan) are a happily-married couple whose life is struck by the baby boomerang. Once Trisha becomes a mother, she puts her marriage on the back burner. This leaves Sid feeling frustrated, neglected and insecure. Sid's brother in-law (Ram Kapoor) advises him to tell white lies and carve some time and space for himself. So the poor baby, sorry... husband, starts living a double life — half the time, he's a family man and the rest of the time, he pretends to be single dude. 

Then, after some unnecessary melodrama involving accidents, confessions and a strategically timed sunrise, Sid and Trisha must decide whether they can actually do this thing called marriage or if they'll be victims of its "side effects". Chaudhary's script is juvenile and heavily biased in favour of Sid. Not only is the entire film literally narrated by Sid, thus providing only his perspective, the events in the film allow Trisha few instances in which she can redeem herself. Sid is entirely insensitive to the challenges Trisha faces — from being a "hormonal nutcase" because of her pregnancy, to putting on weight and feeling unattractive, and raising a child almost single-handedly. But the way Chaudhary has written Trisha's character, she's insufferable for most of the film so no matter how much you may want to, you just can't side with her. As far as Chaudhary is concerned, Sid is the victim. Even when Sid admits he's in the wrong, it's an exercise in reverse psychology. How can you not love a man who will admit he's in the wrong? So what if he's not actually taking responsibility for his actions because hey, his wife drove him to make the mistakes he did? The fact is, if Sid wasn't being played by Akhtar, we probably wouldn't care for him. Not only is Akhtar cute as a button, he's got excellent comic timing and even when the script teeters into melodrama, his performance doesn't. He only looks uncomfortable in a few of the sequences where he's made to do filmi choreography. Otherwise, Akhtar makes Shaadi... watchable and it's his acting rather than the writing that draws the laughs. Aside from Akhtar, there's little to praise in Shaadi... . Balan is strapped in a role and wardrobe that do her no favours. The supporting cast includes Ram Kapoor, Rati Agnihotri, Ila Arun, Vir Das and Purab Kohli and they're competent but unremarkable. It's difficult to tell whether Ila Arun as "Aunty" was supposed to be the ideal nanny or the nanny from hell. The only person saddled with a more uni-dimensional character than Trisha's is Das, who plays a tattooed wannabe actor who can't say a sentence without the word "bro" in it. (That's presumably to clue us into the fact that he is a hipster.) The comedy evaporates from Shaadi... post-interval. In fact, the blooper reel that accompanies the end credits is more enjoyable than most of the attempted comedy in the second half. Chaudhary tries to hold the audience's attention by introducing ridiculous twists. However, this doesn't change the fact that the film barely has a story. This isn't surprising. Marriages are rarely eventful. To make them interesting and engaging, a story must reveal the nuances and emotional layer cake that is a 'normal' marriage. Presumably, Chaudhary thought he was being cheeky when he included not-so-subtle nods to his lead pair's real life in Shaadi... . So Balan's character is married to one Siddharth Roy while Balan is actually married to UTV's Siddharth Roy Kapoor. The film begins with Sid and Trisha meeting in a night club, which is perhaps a nod to how Akhtar met his wife, hairstylist and entrepreneur Adhuna. Trisha struggles with being voluptuous, which, as we've learnt thanks to Koffee With Karan, is a battle that Balan has fought with herself. In Shaadi..., Sid is initially an aspiring singer who is largely dependent upon Trisha who has a well-paying job that she loves. That's reminiscent of how at the start of the Akhtars' relationship, Adhuna was the successful one while Farhan was unemployed and non-descript. However, these are just flickering references that don't actually add much to the film. Chaudhary's script doesn't have any of the maturity that real life demands of a married couple. Despite having two good actors who are happily married in real life, what Shaadi... gives us is a portrait of a resoundingly unhappy marriage between two people who have just one flash of passionate chemistry right at the start of the film. After that, it's just unhappily ever after.