Director Namrata Singh Gujral’s Indo-American saga feels like a dated crossover movie of the genre that was being churned out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Second generation immigrants overcoming a crisis of identity, reconnecting with their roots, finding love against the backdrop of Indian exotica has been done to death. If anything, the sidebar plot point of speaking up for those who identify as transgender is film’s one saving grace.

Big fat Indian weddings are over-hyped, over-exposed affairs in popular culture thanks to bloated - and repeated - Bollywood renditions. They are the worst thing that an Indian-American filmmaker can single out as a marker of her ethnic roots. So it is for Los Angeles-based fashion journo Shania Dhaliwal (Nargis Fakhri), the female protagonist of Namrata Singh Gujral's first directorial feature, 5 Weddings, an inert comedy of manners done in by a pedestrian premise.

Rajkummar Rao's presence in 5 Weddings is not worthy in such a flimsy culture-clash drama. Not that he does not pull his weight, but so shallow is the material that he is expected breathe life into that nothing he does can lift the film out of its comatose state and lend it a genuine spark. Nargis Fakhri, deliver her lines in her own voice for once, does a fair job of looking lost in a setting that is alien to her. But she contributes nothing beyond that to the drama of a girl looking for her father and seeking to reconnect with the land of her birth from which she has drifted away completely.

5 Weddings is anything but a happy marriage of style and content. On both crucial fronts, it is left scrounging for inspiration. The only thing it does with any degree of authority is skim the surface of a genre that has been done to death. With absolutely nothing textually new or texturally fresh on offer, it's down for the count from the word go.