Emraan Hashmi wearing a wide-brimmed fedora and a trench coat while completely invisible is an image that stays with you, mostly because it looks like a Halloween costume bought off a clearance rack at midnight. If I'm honest, the whole visual conceit of Mr. X feels less like a calculated sci-fi thriller and more like a high-concept dress-up party where someone forgot to tell the wardrobe department that invisibility doesn't mean you still get to accessorize with heavy leather jackets. You watch him stalking through the corridors of Mumbai, transparent from the neck down except for whatever fedora-and-glasses trickery the VFX team cooked up on a Friday afternoon, and you wonder how anyone in the vicinity keeps a straight face. It is a strange sort of cinema that demands you accept a glowing hat floating six feet off the pavement as a terrifying instrument of vengeance, but that is the baseline Vikram Bhatt establishes in the opening reel and expects us to just roll with.

Vikram Bhatt has always had a peculiar relationship with genre tropes, treating them not as rules to follow but as suggestions he can occasionally misplace. The direction here relies heavily on washed-out blue filters and swooping crane shots that make every interior look like it was filmed inside a freezing corporate lobby after hours. The screenplay, credited to Shagufta Rafique, lurches from courtroom melodrama to botched anti-terrorism sting operations with the grace of a shopping cart with two stuck wheels. Raghuram Rathod, the man who becomes the invisible vigilante, starts life as an idealistic bomb disposal expert before a chemical mishap leaves him with mutated skin and a bitter grudge against the state. We are meant to feel the sting of his betrayal by the very system he swore to protect, but the script rushes through his emotional baseline so quickly that he is already wearing his signature hat and murdering corrupt ministers before we even learn what he likes to eat for breakfast. The logic of his invisibility is delightfully loose, bending and snapping whenever the plot requires him to eavesdrop on a crucial phone call or slip past armed guards without making a single floorboard creak, though it never quite explains how his clothes manage to turn transparent alongside his epidermis.

As the man behind the glowing specs, Emraan Hashmi brings his usual weary charm to a role that essentially asks him to act mostly with his chin and a rasping voice box. He has played the wronged anti-hero in so many hindi films that he can do this kind of bruised resentment in his sleep, tilting his head just right to catch the dim lighting while delivering threats about justice with a dry throat. He doesn't stretch himself here, but he anchors the cartoonish premise with a grounded, low-energy sneer that prevents the whole enterprise from dissolving into pure camp. Amyra Dastur, playing his fiancée-turned-pursuer on the police force, spends a lot of time aiming assault rifles at empty chairs and looking deeply concerned about the weather. Her performance consists largely of standing in the middle of a room, gasping at a breeze, and shouting Raghu's name with an urgency that suggests she misplaced her car keys rather than her mutated lover. Arunoday Singh, meanwhile, chews through his dialogue as the heavy-handed antagonist with a booming menace that occasionally threatens to shatter the flimsy drywall behind him. He has this habit of narrowing his eyes and chewing his lower lip before every single monologue, a tiny tic that makes him look less like a master criminal and more like a man trying to dislodge a popcorn kernel from his back teeth. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every time he came on screen.

The technical side of the production leans hard into digital gloss that often looks like a screensaver from 2008. The visual effects team clearly had a budget cap that didn't stretch to making a fully transparent human body look convincing, so they settled for a watery silhouette effect that flickers whenever Hashmi moves too fast against a brick wall. The cinematography by Pravin Bhatt loves a good lens flare, spraying amber and teal across the frame during action sequences that are chopped up by editing so frantic you can barely tell who is punching whom. Speaking of the editing, there is a recurring tendency to linger on reactions shots for two seconds too long, freezing an actor's grimace in mid-air right before cutting to a sweeping exterior drone shot of the Gateway of India. The soundtrack, composed by Jeet Gannguli and Ankit Tiwari, arrives with predictable regularity every fifteen minutes to halt the narrative dead in its tracks for a romantic ballad shot in some windswept foreign locale that has nothing to do with the damp streets of the story. You get used to the pattern: a gunfight breaks out, someone gets thrown through a glass partition, and suddenly Hashmi is slow-dancing with Dastur in front of a digital waterfall while wearing a silk scarf.

Beneath the slippery surface effects, the film tries to grapple with ideas about institutional corruption and the blurred lines between legal retribution and personal vendetta, themes that have powered half the action output of bollywood over the past few decades. Back when a younger Sunny Deol was screaming about systemic rot in Ghayal, those films at least bothered to build a convincing social reality before burning it down. Here, the corruption is sketched in broad strokes of men in sharp suits shouting into landline phones while standing near marble pillars, making the political stakes feel completely abstract and weightless. Raghu's transformation into an invisible outcast is supposed to represent the way society erases whistleblowers and moral dissidents, but the metaphor gets lost the second he uses his superpower to steal a sports car or play elaborate pranks on his former boss. The morality of the narrative is totally tangled up, cheering for a man who executes people in parking garages just because the script labeled them as bad guys, while the police force he left behind is portrayed as a bunch of bumbling extras waiting to be tripped over.

There is a peculiar charm to how unpretentious this whole mess is, even when it is failing on almost every technical and narrative level. It doesn't pretend to be a prestige psychological drama, nor does it try for the self-aware irony that ruins so many modern blockbusters. It just plods along for two hours, throwing invisibility gags, poorly dubbed dialogue, and melodramatic showdowns at the wall to see what sticks. When the credits finally roll, you don't feel cheated out of your evening, just vaguely bewildered by the sheer amount of smoke and mirrors deployed in service of a plot that could have been resolved if someone had just turned on a blacklight in the hallway. It sits comfortably in that vast middle tier of hindi movies that nobody talks about five years after release, destined for late-night cable rotation where its strange digital sheen and wooden line deliveries can be appreciated without any heavy-handed expectations of greatness.