Salman Khan wears the exact same pair of aviator sunglasses for roughly half of Radhe, which is a small thing to fixate on perhaps, but the lenses are so heavily tinted they look like two solid chunks of obsidian glued onto his face. You can see the reflection of a lighting umbrella in them during a mid-day foot chase, bouncing around like a tiny white balloon. It is not great, not bad, just there. This is the kind of cinema where even the reflections in the protagonist's eyewear have stopped trying to pretend they belong to a fictional world. Prabhudheva directs with the frantic energy of someone who has lost his car keys and suspects everyone in a five-block radius has taken them. The camera pans wildly, whips left, zooms in on a boot hitting pavement, and then cuts to a completely different angle of the exact same foot hitting the exact same pavement four frames later. Action scenes in contemporary Bollywood movies often suffer from this hyper-edited seizure style, but here it feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a desperate attempt to obscure the fact that nobody involved wants to run very fast.

The screenplay by Vijay Maurya and A.C. Mughur reads like it was assembled from a box of discarded index cards found in a Mumbai dumpster behind a studio lot. There are scenes where characters stand in concrete parking garages and explain their entire criminal philosophy to one another while neon blue light hums overhead. It feels like watching a rehearsal where the actors haven't quite memorized their lines yet so they just keep repeating the word brother until they remember the next verb. Randeep Hooda plays the villain, Rana, with a greasy ponytail and a manic grin that suggests he watched too many Batman villains on a scratched DVD and decided to try all of them at once. He kills people with butter knives, he punches glass walls until his knuckles bleed, and he screams a lot of lines about ruling the city before breakfast. Disha Patani is also in the movie, mostly tasked with standing near various pools of water or walking slowly in oversized t-shirts while the wind machine blows her hair across her eyes with surgical precision. She has about as much chemistry with Khan as a cardboard cutout of a palm tree, which is to say none, but at least the palm tree doesn't have to deliver lines about falling in love during a shootout at a pharmaceutical warehouse.

Cinematographer Anay Goswamy bathes everything in a monochromatic teal and orange filter that makes Mumbai look less like a real metropolis and more like a poorly rendered level from a 2008 video game console. The soundtrack arrives in loud, sudden bursts of synthesized percussion that try to convince you something momentous is happening while Khan walks slowly toward a warehouse door in extreme slow motion. There is a recurring musical sting that sounds suspiciously like a distorted car horn, and it plays every single time Randeep Hooda does something vaguely menacing, which means you hear it about forty-five times in the first hour. It gets to be a bit much after a while. The songs themselves are dropped in without any narrative breathing room, pulling the plot to a dead halt so thirty backup dancers can materialize out of thin air behind Khan on a desolate stretch of highway. If you have seen Wanted, which was also directed by Prabhudheva way back when cell phones still had physical keypads, you have essentially seen this exact movie already, just with fewer decent jokes and a lot more grey paint on the walls.

Beneath the bluster and the endless slow-motion walks, the film operates on a strange, archaic moral logic where due process is treated as a minor inconvenience that only delays the inevitable punch to the jaw. Khan plays an encounter specialist, which is the polite cinematic euphemism for a cop who executes suspects in alleyways and then goes home to eat noodles with his aging parents. There is zero tension regarding whether he will survive any given encounter because the camera treats him like a religious icon visiting a troubled province rather than an active participant in a narrative. When he fights twenty guys in a narrow hallway, they take turns charging him one by one with lead pipes, politely waiting for their turn to be launched through a drywall partition. Hindi films have spent decades perfecting this specific brand of vigilante wish-fulfillment, but recent entries like this one feel increasingly hollow, devoid of the genuine swagger that made older hits watchable on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in around the ninety-minute mark of a bad action movie, right when the plot stops pretending to matter and devolves into a series of identical fistfights inside abandoned factories. The dialogue becomes sparse, the background score becomes a relentless wall of noise, and the lead actor stops changing his shirt. Khan delivers his final monologue about cleaning up the city while staring directly into the lens with an expression that looks suspiciously like he is trying to remember if he left his kitchen stove turned on back home. It's a small thing, but it bugged me. You leave the theater or close the streaming app without feeling angry or energized, just acutely aware of the time you will never get back. Radhe doesn't even have the courtesy to be memorably terrible; it just sits there on the screen like a wet gym sock dropped on a hotel carpet, waiting for the credits to roll so everyone can go home.