Originally planned to be titled ‘Dolly Lahore Mein’, ‘Happy Bhag Jayegi’ is a carefree, nonchalant film which promises much but fails to go the distance.

Harpreet ‘Happy’ Kaur (Diana Penty) is a feisty and plucky bride-to-be who decides to play the vanishing trick on her wedding day in Amritsar. Jumping into a truck laden with fruit, she inadvertently lands in the sprawling Lahore villa of the ex-governor of Pakistan Javed Ahmed (Jawed Shaikh). His son Bilal (Abhay Deol), who’s engaged to Zoya (Pakistani actress Momal Shaikh) and who the father has groomed to be Pakistan’s next Jinnah, is more interested in cricket than politics. When Bilal, who develops a soft corner for Happy, is blackmailed by her into doing her bidding, he travels to Amritsar to find Guddu (Ali Fazal), Happy’s love interest.

Set in Amritsar and Lahore, HBJ is a wise-cracking sitcom with some hilarious moments and pertinent reflections — when the Pakistani senior policeman Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra) sees Gandhi’s face on Indian currency, he utters tongue-in-cheek ‘kaash Mahatma Gandhi Pakistan mein hotey’. Or when Afridi tells Guddu ‘ask me anything, but Kashmir’.  There are some delightful references to the Madhubala-Dilip Kumar romance too. But Bilal’s father constantly imploring the son to ‘change the history of Pakistan’ (I guess that’s something which happens there on a day-to-day basis) becomes a little too much to bear.

Abhay Deol, seen on the screen after a couple of years, and Diana Penty, after her ‘Cocktail’ debut four years ago, give fairly impressive performances.  Of the supporting cast, Piyush Mishra’s dialogue delivery reminds one of the late Saeed Jaffery, while Kanwaljit Singh as the father of the bride is restricted to looking menacing and glaring. Jimmy Sheirgill, as the local corporator-cum-goon, and on whom Happy has walked out on her wedding day, displays his acting histrionics once again. Though the second half lags in the tautness of the script, HBJ is entertaining with a dash of subtle comedy and which stops short of disparaging across-the-border comments.