Ranveer Singh wears a gold chain that looks heavy enough to pull his collarbone down toward the floorboards, and if I'm honest, that accessory does half the character work in the opening twenty minutes of Simmba. Rohit Shetty directs action sequences like he is trying to punch a hole right through the back of the screen, which works remarkably well when the man getting hit is flying through a fruit cart but grows slightly exhausting during the quieter dialogue scenes where nobody is detonating an auto-rickshaw. This is the kind of cinema that smells faintly of popcorn grease and high-octane gasoline, a loud piece of commercial Hindi cinema that refuses to whisper even when the characters are standing in a small room.

The plot follows Sangram Bhalerao, a corrupt police inspector from the same fictional universe that birthed Singham, though Simmba has none of that earlier film's stoic, gravel-voiced righteousness. He takes bribes with a cheerful wink and works out of a station house that resembles a bustling local market more than a pillar of law enforcement. Then a tragedy strikes close to home involving a young doctor who treats him like an annoying younger brother, and the narrative abruptly shifts gears from a lighthearted farce about police extortion into a thunderous revenge melodrama. It is a jarring pivot, the cinematic equivalent of turning your car sharply to the left at eighty miles per hour because you missed your turn, leaving the passenger clutching the dashboard in mild terror.

Sara Ali Khan plays Shaguni, the love interest, and her job description mostly consists of smiling brightly in various colorful outfits while standing near Ranveer Singh so the camera has something pretty to look at between fight scenes. She does not get much to sink her teeth into until the narrative requires her to look devastated, at which point she tries her best with material that treats her character less like a person and more like a moral pressure valve for the hero's conscience. Ranveer Singh, on the other hand, operates at a frequency that can only be described as frantic, chewing the scenery until there are literal splinters flying everywhere, though his boundless energy keeps the movie from sagging during its slower patches. When he weeps over a dead body, his whole face contorts in a way that feels genuinely unhinged, divorced from the usual vanity of modern movie stars who prefer to cry with a single tear running down a well-powdered cheek.

Ajay Devgn shows up in the final twenty minutes wearing aviators and an expression of profound weariness, stepping out of a Mahindra Scorpio like a deity descending from Mount Olympus to sort out the mess the mortals have made. His cameo is less a performance and more an institutional endorsement, connecting this loud, erratic contraption to the broader lineage of Hindi movies about righteous cops delivering instant street justice with their bare hands. The editing during these climax sequences moves so fast that sometimes you lose track of who is punching whom, which might be a deliberate strategy to obscure the limitations of the stunt choreography or just an editor who drank six espressos before sitting down at the Avid.

Jomon T. John shoots the proceedings with a vibrant, hyper-saturated palette that makes every police station, street corner, and villainous hideout look like it was painted by someone who only owns primary colors. The lighting is unapologetically artificial, throwing blue and orange gels onto actors' faces even when they are standing under broad daylight, giving the entire enterprise the texture of an expensive music video. Speaking of music, Tanishk Bagchi and the various other credited composers throw a relentless barrage of bass-heavy remixes at your eardrums, recycling old tracks until you start hearing the hook in your sleep long after you have left the theater and walked out into the parking lot. It is a small thing, but that recurring horn sample kept playing during scenes where characters were supposedly having serious, emotional conversations, and it completely undermined the gravity of the moment.

The film attempts to address the very real issue of sexual violence in contemporary India, but it handles the topic with the subtlety of a falling safe. It takes a genuine societal trauma and converts it into narrative fuel for a male hero's moral awakening, reducing a complex, systemic horror into a personal vendetta that can be resolved with a pistol and a rainy graveyard showdown. This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of many commercial bollywood movies, where progressive talking points are bolted onto regressive structural formulas because the filmmakers want the social credit of relevance without sacrificing the cheap thrills of vigilante retribution. You can trace a direct line from this kind of storytelling back to older action potboilers where the system is always portrayed as permanently broken beyond repair until a single, charismatic man decides to break the law in order to uphold justice.

As the closing credits begin to roll over a self-referential dance number featuring half the cast in matching denim jackets, you are left wondering if the preceding two and a half hours were an entertaining piece of pop entertainment or a cynical exercise in emotional manipulation. It is entirely too long, structurally disjointed, and morally simplistic in a way that leaves a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth once the neon lights go down. Yet it is also undeniably kinetic, driven by a lead actor who refuses to let the energy drop for even a single second, hurling his entire physical being at the screen with a desperation that commands attention. You do not leave the auditorium feeling enlightened, but you do leave feeling like you have just survived a minor traffic accident.