There is a specific kind of gravelly cough Sanjay Dutt deploys in Prassthanam that belongs entirely to men who have spent too many decades sitting on cane chairs in veranda shadows, waiting for someone to bring them a glass of warm water they didn't ask for. It happens about twenty minutes in, somewhere during a scene where he is supposed to look dangerous, but instead he just looks like his joints are complaining about the humidity. Hindi movies have a long history of aging patriarchs who rule their fiefdoms with a slow blink and a heavy ring, and Dutt fits that mold the way a damp log fits a fireplace, his voice dropped two octaves past where it used to live when he was running across beaches in the nineties. If I'm honest, the whole thing starts with enough testosterone to choke a bull, but it quickly settles into something much dustier and more ordinary, like a dusty provincial office after the clerk has gone home for lunch.

Deva Katta is trying to remake his own Telugu film of the same title from a decade ago, which already feels like an odd choice given how fast political aesthetics have shifted in the interim, sliding sideways from ideological posturing into something much more transactional and small-minded. The screenplay doesn't really know whether it wants to be an epic family saga about land and blood or just a messy soap opera about a bad father with too many guns, so it constantly stumbles between these two tones, hitting a dramatic peak only to drop back into a scene where people just shout at each other over wooden tables while a ceiling fan creaks. The camera movements by M. Sukumar feel frantic in places they shouldn't be, cutting away from dialogue beats just as they get slightly interesting, though he does manage a few decent wide shots of Uttar Pradesh landscapes that look bleached out by the afternoon glare.

Jackie Shroff shows up as Baadshah, a loyal retainer who wears a leather vest and a perpetual expression of mild confusion, looking less like a hardened gangster and more like a retired stuntman who wandered onto the wrong set and decided to just stay for the catering. Shroff has this tic where he nods twice after every sentence delivered by anyone else in the frame, which becomes intensely distracting once you notice it, like a metronome that's out of sync with the band. Ali Fazal plays the stepson Ayush, the moral anchor of the household who tries to read books while everyone else is plotting murders, and he brings a nice, weary intelligence to the part that feels somewhat at odds with the bombast surrounding him. He isn't given much to do besides frown at people who are being corrupt, but he does it with a kind of quiet stiffness that reminds you of his work in Mirzapur, only without the benefit of a six-episode arc to let the character breathe.

Manisha Koirala is relegated to standing in doorways looking tragic while men shout about their honor, a waste of talent that feels almost mandatory in this particular corner of commercial cinema where mothers are treated mostly as furniture with lines. The soundtrack by Anup Rubens and others hits every single cliché in the action-drama handbook, relying on heavy percussion and choral wails whenever someone picks up a rifle, though there is one recurring flute motif that gets used three times in ten minutes during a stretch in the second half. It's a small thing but it bugged me, that particular laziness where the sound design has to underline the emotional state of a character who is already crying on screen, as if the audience might mistake grief for indigestion without the help of a woodwind. The editing by Praveen Pudi also has this annoying habit of lingering on reaction shots for an extra beat too long, draining the momentum right out of scenes that were supposed to crackle with tension, turning what should have been sharp exchanges into slow-moving debates.

The core conflict hinges on the eternal battle between bloodline and merit, a theme that has fueled half the political dramas made in Mumbai since the seventies, though here it feels oddly weightless because the stakes are never properly defined beyond who gets to sit in the big chair. We are told repeatedly that the family controls local governance and land distribution, but we never actually see the people they are supposed to be ruling over, leaving the political machinations feeling like an empty board game played in an abandoned room. Compared to Prakash Jha's Rajneeti, which at least attempted to map out the messy mechanics of party politics and ideological corruption, Prassthanam stays strictly inside the courtyard walls, preferring family melodrama to actual social observation.

There is a recurring motif involving a pistol that gets handed down from father to son like an heirloom, except nobody ever cleans it, which bothers me more than the actual murders because guns rust in that kind of weather if you don't take care of them. The supporting cast includes Chunky Pandey in a rare serious turn as a slimy politician, and while he tries his best to drop his usual comedic cadence, his voice is clearly dubbed by someone else who didn't quite match his mouth movements in two crucial confrontation scenes. Those little technical slips accumulate over the runtime, dragging down what could have been a lean, mean genre exercise into something bloated and slightly confusing. By the time the third act rolls around with its obligatory rain-soaked shootout and final moral accounting, you are mostly just watching people yell in the mud while the lighting crew tries to make night look like day with too many blue gels.

Sanjay Dutt remains watchable simply because he has spent forty years figuring out how to occupy a wide frame without doing very much, leaning against doorframes and squinting against the lights with the heavy, unearned authority of a man who knows he's the biggest name on the poster. His performance isn't subtle, and the script doesn't allow for any genuine surprises in his character arc, but he anchors the chaos just enough that the film doesn't completely fly apart at the seams. It's not a disaster by any stretch, nor is it particularly memorable once the credits start rolling and the screen goes dark on yet another low-frequency drone from the synthesizer.

The problem isn't that the material is old-fashioned, because old-fashioned stories about corrupt families can still bite if the dialogue has any salt in it, but rather that the film is terrified of being quiet for more than ten seconds at a time. Every emotional beat has to be underlined by a crash of thunder or a swelling string section, leaving no room for the actors to find the small, accidental moments that usually save this kind of regional-remake pulp from feeling completely mechanical. Chunky Pandey's dubbed dialogue continues to drift out of sync during the climax, and the final image of Dutt sitting alone on his porch feels less like a tragic downfall and more like an exhausted actor waiting for the director to yell cut so he can go back to his trailer.