Hrithik Roshan's left eye does this strange, lazy squint right before he cracks a tooth-filled smile that never reaches the corners of his mouth. It is a small piece of business, repeated maybe four times across two and a half hours, but it anchors the whole performance in something greasy and lived-in. If I'm honest, I spent the first twenty minutes trying to figure out if he was doing a specific impression of Sanjay Dutt from Khalnayak or just inventing a new kind of gangster twitch on the fly. Hindi cinema has spent the last decade trying to make its villains either too slick or too philosophical, yet here comes Roshan playing a barefoot killer who looks like he smells perpetually of fried fish and old tobacco. He bites an ear off in the opening reel with a casualness that suggests he has done it on Tuesdays before breakfast. Vikram Vedha arrives with the heavy luggage of being a remake of a cult Tamil hit, though Pushkar and Gayathri, returning to helm their own material, refuse to let the expanded budget choke the dirt out of the corners. They keep the cameras close enough to smell the sweat on Saif Ali Khan's brow. Saif plays Vikram, the encounter specialist who believes the world is divided neatly into good guys and bad guys with no gray areas permitted in between. He wears these thin-framed glasses and keeps his jaw clenched so tight I kept waiting for a molar to snap right on camera. They play a cat-and-mouse game through the dusty, sun-baked sprawl of Lucknow—though it was shot mostly in other places, the geography matters less than the interrogation rooms where these two men sit across from each other. Every time they lock horns, the movie forgets about its action choreography and just becomes two actors chewing on thick, meaty dialogue that actually sounds like people arguing under fluorescent lights. It's not great, not bad, just there, but the rhythm of their conversational sparring has a real snap to it.

The screenplay keeps the basic structure of the Vikram-Betaal folklore intact, using Vedha as a narrative trickster who tells stories with hidden moral traps. Every time Vikram corners him, Vedha surrenders voluntarily just to tell him a parable that forces the cop to question his own certainty. It is a clever framing device that usually turns tedious in action pictures because filmmakers treat the flashback scenes as homework to be rushed through before the next explosion. Here, the flashbacks carry as much weight as the present-day shootouts, charting how Vedha's younger brother, played with a quiet, doomed intensity by Rohit Saraf, got pulled into the syndicate. Saraf has this youthful, vulnerable face that makes his inevitable corruption land with a heavy thud, contrasting sharply with the scarred, weathered skin of the older men around him. Radhika Apte shows up as Priya, Vikram's defense attorney wife who happens to be taking Vedha's case, setting up a domestic tension that the film handles with surprising economic restraint. There are no screaming matches in the kitchen, just cold silences and half-eaten dinners pushed aside while they argue about jurisprudence and extrajudicial killings. Yet the editing sometimes trips over its own feet during the transitional sequences, cutting away from a character's reaction half a beat too soon just to catch a stuntman landing on a crash mat. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened, pulling me out of the gritty reality the directors spent so much time constructing. Bollywood movies often struggle with this specific transition rhythm, wanting so badly to get to the next punch that they forget to let the previous bruise turn purple.

P.S. Vinod's cinematography treats the light of Uttar Pradesh like a physical weight that the characters have to drag around with them all day. The exteriors are bleached out by a harsh, glaring sun that makes everyone squint, while the interiors fall into deep, murky shadows where you can barely see the expression on a man's face until he steps under a bulb. It avoids the glossy, teal-and-orange sheen that has infected half of all contemporary Hindi films, opting instead for a gritty, dust-choked palette that feels closer to Ram Gopal Varma's Company than any modern studio release. The background score by Sam C.S. leans heavily on thrumming percussion and tribal chants that occasionally threaten to swallow the dialogue whole. There is a specific recurring acoustic motif whenever Vedha starts walking toward the camera that started to wear out its welcome by the third time it played. I found myself wishing they had turned the volume down on the drums and just let the sound of his bare feet slapping against the concrete do the heavy lifting. The sound design is otherwise meticulous, capturing the distinct click of a Glock safety and the wet crunch of bone during the hand-to-hand altercations that populate the second half. These fights are messy, unchoreographed-looking brawls where men lose their breath in seconds and spend the rest of the round flailing wildly in the dirt. No one is doing wire-fu gymnastics or defying gravity; they are just trying to survive long enough to pick up a dropped pistol.

Underneath the bullets and the moral posturing, the film is essentially an argument about the utility of state violence versus street justice. Vikram represents the institutional machine that believes legality is a sufficient substitute for ethics, while Vedha operates on a code of blood-debt and retribution that makes him a monster who is somehow easier to stomach than the clean-handed cops who sign off on fake encounters. The script refuses to give you an easy out, declining to validate either worldview by the time the credits roll. Saif plays Vikram's crumbling certainty with a fine-grained nervous energy, letting his hands shake slightly when he realizes the men he thought were heroes might actually be monsters in uniform. Hrithik, meanwhile, leans into the myth-making aspect of his character, playing Vedha not just as a killer but as the storyteller who writes his own legend as he goes along. It is a dual-act performance that holds the entire contraption together even when the middle section sags under the weight of too many narrative detours and redundant flashbacks. Hindi movies have always had a complicated relationship with the anti-hero, stretching all the way back to Amitabh Bachchan's angry young man persona in Deewaar, but this film updates that archetype for an era where institutions are too corrupted to trust and individuals are too broken to save anyone but themselves. You leave the theater arguing about who won the final moral impasse, which is probably the exact reaction the filmmakers wanted from the start.