For a rom-com which needs to be light on its feet, hitting fours and sixes as it goes along, the writing is not as supple as it should have been. Too many slog overs here.

The Zoya Factor movie cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Sonam Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor, Manu Rishi, Angad Bedi, Sikander Kher, Koel Purie
The Zoya Factor movie director: Abhishek Sharma
The Zoya Factor movie rating: Two and a half stars

When it came out in 2008, Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor redefined Indian chick-lit. I’d go further and say that her debut novel was one of a kind. It had the mandatory made-for-each-other girl and guy. It had the meet-cute, bicker-snicker will-she-won’t-she, will-he-won’t-he, till they did, which was fine and dandy all by itself. What Chauhan also did was corral the India it was set in (especially the vagaries of the advertising world) with a precise and wicked eye. The thing between the girl and guy was fresh and zingy, overlaid with just the right degree of sexiness, and the whole was laugh-out-loud funny.

The book was always going to be a movie. No way that Zoya Solanki, the wavy-haired klutzy advertising rookie, and Nikhil Khoda, the tall, dark and handsome cricketer, were not going to be lobbing snappy remarks and sparking together, on a screen near you.

It’s taken more than ten years, and while Sonam’s Zoya and Dulquer’s Nikhil make a good-looking pair, I wasn’t as blown away by them as I was hoping to: they come together only intermittently, as does the film. The rest of it is surprisingly contrived and bland: how did the film manage it with the author, whose brand of sprightly silliness can be addictive, on board?