Akshay Kumar, centre, plays a lowly Indian cook who is believed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese warrior in the action comedy Chandni Chowk to China. (Warner Bros.)

I have a brother-in-law who is a terrific cook and has no qualms about mixing different cuisines in one meal. Sit down at his table, and you might tuck into some combination of, say, baba ghanouj, tacos and sushi. Chandni Chowk to China, the new Bollywood-meets-chop-socky movie, is the cinematic equivalent of one of his mongrel feasts.

It’s tempting to call actor Akshay Kumar India’s answer to Adam Sandler — like Sandler, Kumar’s clowning veers between the endearing and the irritating.

Touted as a historic screen collaboration between India and China, this Hindi-language feature adds martial arts to that already-full plate known as the Bollywood masala flick. In other words, it’s a slapstick comedy, a weepy drama, a crime thriller and a musical — with kung fu sprinkled on top.

In theory, all this genre splicing, like my brother-in-law’s culinary mash-ups, could be enjoyable — a something-for-everyone smorgasbord. But Chandni Chowk (a.k.a. CC2C) is wildly uneven. And at two-and-a-half hours, it sags perilously in the middle like a tightrope gone slack. You may find your attention tumbling to the net well before the inevitable fists-of-fury showdown.

The movie is tailored to the talents of Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, who began as an action man in the 1990s and has since remade himself as a popular comedian. It’s tempting to call him India’s answer to Adam Sandler — like Sandler, Kumar’s clowning veers between the endearing and the irritating. In CC2C, he gets to show off both sides as a bumbling fool who transforms himself into a kung-fu hero. There’s also a bit of autobiography in the storyline: like his character, Kumar grew up in Delhi’s teeming Chandni Chowk neighbourhood and worked as a cook before taking up martial arts en route to his film career.

Luckless and clumsy, Sidhu (Kumar) is stuck chopping vegetables in his adoptive father’s food stall when a delegation from China turns up. They’re convinced Sidhu is the reincarnation of Liu Sheng, an ancient warrior, and they want the cook to come to their village and defeat its scourge, the criminal kingpin Hojo (Gordon Liu). Sidhu happily agrees to the trip, not realizing that his Chinese translator, a sketchy spiritual guide named Chopstick (Ranvir Shorey), neglected to explain the part about Sidhu “defeating Hojo.” And so Sidhu and Chopstick depart for China, Sidhu bringing along a lucky potato that resembles the elephant god Ganesh.

Villainous smuggler Hojo (Gordon Liu, left), seen with his accomplice Meow Meow (Deepika Padukone) in Chandni Chowk to China. (Warner Bros.)

Also heading to China is Sakhi (supermodel-cum-actress Deepika Padukone), who stars in sexy television commercials for an Asian electronics company called TSM. She's going to visit the TSM factory and reconnect with the country of her birth. When she was still an infant, she was separated from her Chinese cop father and her identical twin sister, both of whom are presumed dead at the hands of Hojo. As it turns out, however, the two have survived: Dad (Roger Yuan) has lost his memory and lives as a beggar on the Great Wall of China, while Sakhi’s sis, Meow Meow (Padukone again), was adopted by Hojo and is now his diamond-smuggling accomplice.

The first third of the film is giddy fun, with exuberant song-and-dance numbers, loads of cartoonish humour and some nutty Kung Fu Hustle-style effects. For example, when Dada (Mithun Chakraborty), Sidhu’s tough-loving adoptive father, kicks him in the backside, Sidhu goes flying like a football halfway across Delhi. Playing the buffoon, Kumar relies more on mugging and a silly-looking moustache than clever physical business. (Kumar does provide one priceless sight gag, however, when the blockheaded Sidhu tries to cram some luggage into an overhead bin on the plane to China.)

Things take a serious turn, however, after Sidhu arrives in China and learns that he’s expected to take down Hojo. Dada turns up, too, and, disgusted at Sidhu’s cowardice, tries to battle the bad guy himself, with tragic consequences. Many tears and maudlin flashbacks ensue. It seems to take forever before Sidhu finally connects with Sakhi’s beggar father, who becomes his Shaolin master and helps whip him into shape, Rocky fashion. Things finally pick up when the whimpering cook re-emerges as a rugged kung fu warrior with a new set of chopping skills. But the picture never recaptures its early promise.

Apart from the martial arts, director Nikhil Advani does little with the Chinese setting. There’s a token scene at a Beijing opera, but otherwise, the film’s producers seemed bent on emphasizing the fact that they were allowed access to a small stretch of the Great Wall of China; it figures repeatedly as a backdrop, to the point where it feels like the whole film was shot there. The other wonders of the mainland are absent — even as replicas on a Mumbai soundstage.

Indian beauty queen Sakhi (Deepika Padukone) travels to China to pay homage to the land of her birth in Chandni Chowk to China. (Warner Bros.)

The combat sequences are also disappointing, especially considering they were choreographed by stunt maestro Hun Chiu-Ku, who co-ordinated the fantastic fights for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (and the compulsively watchable ones for Kill Bill). There are some cool skirmishes — including a too-brief duel involving a sword and a blade-proof umbrella — but the set-piece battles are uninspired.

Even so, legendary Hong Kong action star Gordon Liu gives us an irresistible villain. The snake-eyed Hojo is an elegant baddie straight out of James Bond, with a silver-headed cane and a razor-edged bowler hat that he uses as a boomerang, à la Oddjob in Goldfinger. There is also reliable work from Bollywood eminence Chakraborty as the stern Dada. Padukone, a newcomer who made her debut in the 2007 hit Om Shanti Om, acquits herself well in her good twin/bad twin roles, playing Sakhi as a doe-eyed Indian princess and Meow Meow as a knife-throwing femme fatale that Quentin Tarantino would love.

In keeping with the multicultural spirit, the music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy is a pan-Asian chutney in which traditional Chinese melody bumps up against tabla and sitar, with hip hop and disco also jostling for attention. (The movie’s much-repeated title song is so insistent that I’m still trying to scrape it out of my temporal lobes.)

Co-produced by Warner Brothers and India's R.S. Entertainment, the movie also marks a rare Hollywood-Bollywood collaboration. Warner is distributing it widely in North America, but I suspect it will still appeal largely to Kumar’s legions of fans. Overlong and undercooked, Chandni Chowk to China isn't likely to win over uninitiated western moviegoers to the toothsome delights of Bollywood's buffet.

In Hindi, with English subtitles.

Chandni Chowk to China opens Jan. 16.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.