There is a specific kind of squint Ajay Devgn does in Naam that I have seen in at least a dozen other Hindi films from that decade, where he narrows his eyes just enough to suggest he is calculating the weight of a wet stone, or perhaps wondering if he left the stove on before driving out to shoot a confrontation scene in an abandoned mill. It is a look that has very little to do with whatever emotional crisis the script is currently shoving him into, and if I'm honest, it constitutes about eighty percent of his total acting toolkit for the first forty minutes of this picture. Bollywood movies have a long and storied history of treating the brooding protagonist not as a person with an inner life, but as an imposing silhouette that occasionally stops to deliver a punchline or stare blankly at a wall while the sound designer works overtime. Naam belongs squarely in that crowded room, a mid-tier release that arrived with the sort of muted thud usually reserved for projects that spent three years caught in post-production limbo before the producers simply decided to cut their losses and dump the reels into empty theaters on a rainy Friday morning. It is not a disaster, exactly, but it has that peculiar grey texture of something that was shot across five different schedules over an eighteen-month span without anyone ever quite remembering what the central plot was supposed to be about.

Director Anees Bazmee has never been confused with a formalist, which is fine, because formalism requires a kind of patience that commercial Hindi cinema rarely rewards at the box office. Here, his camera seems to operate on a strict quota system, moving just enough to prove the operator hasn't fallen asleep against the tripod, before settling down into the most functional, flat medium shots imaginable. People walk into rooms, they stop at arbitrary markers on the floor, they deliver their lines with the crisp articulation of actors who know their dubbing will happen in a climate-controlled studio three weeks later, and then they walk out again through a door that rarely matches the continuity of the hallway they supposedly just exited. That kind of sloppy spatial geography used to bother me more than it does now, but watching Naam, I found myself strangely comforted by its sheer mechanical indifference. The editing by Dilip Kothari lacks any sense of internal rhythm, cutting away from reaction shots half a beat too early, as if the cutter was trying to catch a local train and needed to shave four seconds off every dialogue exchange regardless of whether a punchline had time to land. There is a scene near the midway point where Devgn receives some ostensibly life-altering news about his past, and instead of holding on his face to let the revelation register, the film immediately cuts to a wide shot of a passing auto-rickshaw that has nothing to do with anything happening in the scene, which is a choice that defies logic while remaining entirely consistent with the slapdash carpentry holding the rest of the narrative together.

Sameera Reddy and Bhoomika Chawla share the burden of playing the women caught in the gravitational pull of Devgn's perennial scowl, and both deserve hazard pay for managing to invest their underwritten dialogue with anything resembling genuine human distress. Reddy gets the more physically demanding assignments, which mostly involve standing in doorways wearing startlingly bright shades of chiffon and looking concerned while the background score swells with synthetic strings that sound suspiciously like a preset on a Casio keyboard from 1998. Chawla, whose work in Tere Naam remains one of the more genuinely affecting turns in modern mainstream cinema, is given even less to do here than her co-star, relegated to a series of soft-focus close-ups where she is required to nod understandingly while Devgn explains why he has to go out for cigarettes and potentially murder a local syndicate boss. They are both talented performers who deserved better scripts, better directors, and perhaps a wardrobe department that didn't treat primary colors as a substitute for character development.

The soundtrack by Himesh Reshammiya arrives with all the subtlety of a brass band marching through a library, recycling the same three melodic motifs until every romantic duet and action cue begins to blur into a single, unending wall of electronic percussion and nasal vocal runs. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the primary love theme plays every single time two characters make direct eye contact, even if they are just standing in a grocery store aisle discussing the price of onions. You can practically hear the editing room gears grinding as they stretch a four-minute song to fit an eight-minute montage of people walking slowly along Mumbai piers while pretending to be deep in thought. The cinematography matches this sonic exhaustion with a visual palette that alternates between muddy shadows and blown-out daylight, as though the director of photography refused to adjust the aperture whenever the sun went behind a cloud. Nobody looks good in these conditions, least of all the supporting cast of local heavies who spend most of their screen time lurking in unnecessarily smoky warehouses that look like they were constructed out of old shipping pallets and leftover drywall.

Beneath the genre machinery and the predictable twists involving lost identity and familial betrayal, the film attempts to gesture toward some larger statement about how the modern urban landscape chews up young men and spits them out as hired muscle for politicians who don't know their names. It is a familiar theme, worn down to a nub by decades of commercial filmmaking, and Naam adds very little to the conversation beyond giving its protagonist a slightly better leather jacket than the ones worn by the extras he beats up in the third act. The narrative logic is porous enough to drive a truck through, hinging on plot holes big enough to swallow entire character motivations without leaving a trace of debris behind. When the dust finally settles and the closing credits begin to crawl upward against a black screen that mercifully spares us any further musical repetition, you are left with the distinct sensation of having sat through four separate television episodes that were glued together in the dark by someone who had never met the actors. It doesn't ask much of its audience, and in return, it gives back even less.