Bachna Ae Haseeno is wall to wall women. Not wearing many clothes. It's not just my temperature rising, either - so is Ranbir Kapoor's. And the women, as we have established, are already incredibly hot.

The film opens with the title track, a crackly, retro song pinched from a classic old movie, Jum Kisise Kum Naheen. The lead actors, Minissha Lamba, Bipasha Basu, Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor, pull some moves in a gaudy, cramped nightclub.

We then see a brief scene with the sun setting on our antihero as he stands on an Italian beach, which establishes Ranbir's mixed emotions of melancholy and devious acomplishment.

Then the film proper. Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) is a on holiday in Switzerland with his nerdy friends. We know they are nerdy because one is fat and wears specs, another has a homemade wolly jumper and another gawps and blinks at everything Raj says. They thought Switzerland would be full of babes, but find it instead full of cows. Meanwhile Mahi (Minissha Lamba) and her girlfriends are travelling through Europe by rail. Mahi is lost in a fantasy inspired by the classic romantic Bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in which Kajol travels through Europe by rail and finds love with Shah Rukh Khan. Here the film gets enticingly self-referential. Mahi expects to find love just like Kajol did, and several events echo those from the earlier film - she misses the train and finds herself stranded, Raj comes back to rescue her and drive them both to Zurich to rejoin the train, and, yes, something special happens between them inbetween. Mahi is even reading the same novel that Kajol reads in DDLJ (Exodus by Leon Uris).

Mahi is played marvellously by Minissha Lamba, who is an intriguing mixture of Preity Zinta, Kareena Kapoor and Teri Hatcher. She manages to be kooky but not annoying, cute but not insipid. They eat chocolates, they sing and dance, but be thankful they don't dress up in milkmaid gear and saunter through a verdant valley. Raj spends all his money on a scooter to get them to Zurich - evidently his budget isn't as impresive as SRK's. Eventually, marking the film out as daring and progressive, they kiss.

In Zurich Mahi is handed back to her parents, where upon she relates the emotional happenings of the last 24 hours to her gasping friends. Raj also discusses events with his friends, inevitably inflating the sex quotient somewhat. But, Mahi appears in the background while he is narrating his highly charged exploits, and tearfully watches him outraging her modesty. Nice guy, huh?

Our antihero moves to Mumbai some time later. Here in his flat he is disturbed by the banging and thumping coming from next door. It's none other than aspiring actress Radhika, played by the outrageously, spectacularly shapely sex bomb Bipasha Basu. Soon they're doing some banging and thumping of their own, as they move in together. Things are going well between the live-in lovers, until one day Raj's employers, Microsoft, transfer him to Sydney, Australia. RK is all too happy to drop everything and go out there but how to break the news to Radhika? Raj's juvenile friend, all dyed hair and flat screens, advises telling her about his witch of a mother. Too late, Radhika and mum have already bonded over the phone. Next he tells her he's got problems down below, "because of the cycle", and can't have children. No problem, she says, their love will overcome any obstacle. Finally he has a tawdry batchelor party and flounces around in tiger print pants wearing a mask. Radhika comes home in the middle of the party, and is about to tearfully move out, when Raj succumbs and tells her he loves her. He doesn't, of course, and he leaves it until the morning of their wedding to hop on a plane to Sydney and leave Radhika crying in the monsoon rain, her henna running down her arms.

In Sydney Raj and his friend lead lives of childish fantasy, with cars parked in their bedrooms and bottles of spirits lined up in the lounge. The biggest decision they mus make involves which nightclub to go to after work. Then Raj meets Gayatri (the delicious Deepika Padukone) who is, unfeasibly, driving a taxi. She's feisty and independent of mind, see? Even so, when Raj invites her to a product launch his friend can't help but resurrect the old bigotries from home. "But she's a taxi driver!" he sneers. Padukone is every inch the model, striking exquisite poses everywhere she goes. Tall and photogenic, she is a fantastic clotheshorse as well as a spiky screen presence.

They holiday in Italy, spending several minutes in Venice as the camera pans around St Mark's Square, before hotfooting it to Alberobello much further south in Puglia. A hopelessly romantic place with stone trulli dotting the landscape, the pair pull calendar poses on the beach, in the sea and in the tiny alleys around the town. Kapoor provides as much eye candy as Padukone, here, letting the Italian sun shine down on his bronzed stomach as his shirt flutters around him.

Somewhere in Italy, surrounded by thousands of candles and a fountain, Raj proposes, only to be rebuffed by the feisty, independently minded (remember?) Padukone. She doesn't need to be tied down, she says, she can support herself, do things her way.

Raj is heartbroken, and on a whim decides to fly around world apologising to all the women he has ever hurt. He finds Mahi in Amritsar, married. Her husband kindly explains to him that she has been subconciously obsessed with him since those fateful days in Switzerland. Thoughtfully, he only punches him once to knock him out. Following some business with her sister's wedding, he manages to eventually, and not a little presumptuously, tell Mahi to put out more for her fella. Credulity is stretched at this point. Not only are we expected to suspend disbelief to the point where we will accept Raj legging it on a plane to avoid getting married to atomic sex explosion Bipasha Basu, but that a married man will also accept an ex-boyfriend turning up to lecture his wife about her bedroom habits.

In Mumbai he find Radhika is a big movie star, the arrogant kind who sacks PAs for providing the wrong kind of mineral water. Basu misses a chance here to really ham it up, and one suspects this is how she really is in real life, so deadpan does she play it. The action switches to Italy, where in a psychological game Raj becomes Radhika's butler. She works him into the ground, in an attempt to both humiliate him and let him earn her forgiveness. He brings her drinks, picks up her papers, fetches her dry cleaning. Bips fits right in in the bling, label loving island of Capri. Bronzed, husky, busty and just the right side of brassy, she a gloriously over the top diva. Finally she caves and forgives him, but not before emotionally calling him "the worst kind of human being".

Arriving back in Syndey Raj finds his apartment door is wedged shut with the amount of love letters Gayatri has posted through it. He catches a taxi, and who else in the world is driving it but Miss Padukone. Do they get back together? What do you think.

A terrifically light and funny movie, Bachna Ae Haseeno was a real hit with the crowd in my cinema. Boosted by a trio of awesome, scorching hot female talent and the echoes of matinee idolatry that Kapoor brings to the screen, it's a great, flab free romcom. The soundtrack is tight and funky, with a recurring brass theme from the title track giving the whole a retro, Riviera feel.