The most infuriating thing about a film like My Friend Ganesha 2 --- besides the obvious attempt at trying to exploit our mythology's single most adorable deity --- is how condescendingly it talks down to its audience.

Children's cinema only works when the makers try and connect with the children -- and a really good children's film is always great viewing for adults as well. The assumption that you can get away by peddling second-rate lollipops to kids simply because they might not know better is plain stupid -- and they know better than taking candy from strangers anyway.

At a time when kids remember Hermione Granger's birthday, wear Hannah Montana t-shirts and watch extremely evolved cartoons on Nickolodeon, taking their attention spans for granted -- and giving them a tacky half-animated feature and hoping they'll squeal at stupidity -- is not just moronic, it's criminal.

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Even if we try to consume the film as an object of single-minded religious devotion from director Rajiv S Ruia, it doesn't cut it. After some horribly slipshod animated opening credits, the film's first shot is one of Mumbai's famed Siddhivinayak [Images] Temple. Shot two is a close-up of the bright saffron deity within.

So far so maurya, after which we're taken into a painful farce with a really loud -- in both the voluminous and the tasteless sense of the word -- bai in the centre of it all.

The concept -- of the lord God Ganesha popping up as a kid's best friend -- has some very basic potential, but all is negated, and how. From acting to screenplay, it's all horrific. It will be cruel to list all that's wrong with this debacle, but pretty much everything can be summarised by a cringeworthy sequence depicting the cleverest God of all time wearing a red and white cap and riding a sleigh tugged by his mice, to a bhajan set to a tune very similar to Jingle Bells. No ho ho, this.

The good-humoured Ganesha might shrug this film off, but I suggest the filmmakers beware His inevitably irate daddy Shiva -- not to mention Bejan Daruwalla.

Rediff Rating: No stars.