AT THE airport in Bombay, three strapping young men of Indian extraction are quizzed as to the purpose of their trip. The bloke from England, Xerxes Mistry (Alexander Gifford), is on a quest to 'find' himself; the chap from Australia, Ricardo Fernandes (Rahul Bose), is searching for his brother; the guy from New York, Krishna Sahni (Naveen Andrews), is seeking to further his acting career. They all end up in the back of a taxi, then go on to share a flat in a highrise overlooking Bombay, each one managing to land in some kind of hot water. Sahni gets implicated in a film which a shady producer wants to flop as a tax write-off to launder 'black money'. Ricardo scours the phone book for his brother's name among the one million 'Fernandes' listings, and falls for the shady producer's uninhibited mistress. Xerxes gets into scrapes while deciding if he's gay and tries to rehearse with a group of drug-addled musicians, the Bombay Boys, who claim to be big in Bangladesh despite having neither lyrics nor their own instruments ("that's a simple technicality"). And in one rollicking East-meets-West digression, the three pumped-up wayfarers strip for cash to a roomful of Bombay women in saris and sunglasses.

Aside from an interestingly blurred slow shutter-speed sequence of a dash through a market, "Bombay Boys" is unremarkably filmed. It aims to be a spoof, but the end-result pastiche is too eclectic to hold together. The flamboyant, clowning-around Bollywood segments make for good comedy, yet they are awkwardly juxtaposed with local-colour jaunts through the city, with violence and insipid melodrama. Throughout there are stabs at cultural analysis: the travellers talk of "five-star slums and Third-World mentality" while the locals ask, "Who do they think they are, Christopher Columbus?" and bemoan the fact that India "plays shrink to all the world's lunatics". Periodically the three wayfarers also try to work out what has drawn them back to their family origins in India, and tackle the issue of identity: "I'm totally American," asserts Sahni, "I'm not an Indian." Only touching on these themes, "Bombay Boys" treads shallow water and seems out of its depth.