That specific blue tint in the Mumbai jail scenes keeps coming back to me, the kind of aggressive color-grading that makes every concrete wall look like it was scrubbed with laundry detergent, which is an odd choice for a movie that supposedly wants to feel gritty and dangerous yet refuses to let a single shadow exist without a fill light.

AR Murugadoss has made better pictures than Darbar, though if I'm honest, he has also made much worse ones, a middle tier of commercial filmmaking where logic gets traded wholesale for a slo-mo entrance that has to be sustained for an uncomfortable number of seconds while the background actors look around for their cues. The screenplay lurches forward like a car with a bad transmission, shifting from father-daughter sentimentality to execution-style street justice without ever figuring out how to connect those two gears into something that feels driven by character rather than contract obligations. Rajinikanth plays Aditya Arunachalam, a commissioner of police who is introduced decapitating bad guys with a sword on a commuter train, a remarkably unhinged way to restore law and order that the film treats with the same moral gravity as a traffic ticket.

Rajinikanth is seventy years old here and moving with a physical stiffness that the camera tries to hide behind rapid-fire editing and stunt doubles who look nothing like him from the neck up, but every now and then he catches the lens with that old, shark-eyed grin and you remember why the ticket prices go up on release day. He is doing the classic aging-star routine of fighting villains half his age while demanding that we believe he can outrun a convoy of SUVs, yet the charm is stubborn enough to survive even the worst dialogue, lines about women's safety that sound like they were written by an algorithm trained on old editorial pages from a tabloid. Nayanthara shows up in what is essentially an extended cameo, wearing gorgeous sarees and looking deeply concerned whenever the plot requires her to exist in the same room as the protagonist, though her character has zero narrative function beyond giving the hero someone to flash his wedding ring at.

Suniel Shetty plays the main villain, a Mumbai-based international drug lord named Hariharan who has long hair, expensive leather jackets, and a gravelly voice that sounds like he gargles with gravel before every take, but the movie never gives him enough to do besides stand in front of a neon-lit map and threaten people over speakerphone. The antagonist is supposed to be this terrifying criminal mastermind with tentacles stretching across continents, yet he spends most of the runtime waiting patiently in his warehouse for Rajinikanth to track him down, which robs the conflict of any genuine suspense. Bollywood movies often struggle with villains who are just collection plates for the hero's rage, but here the problem is worse because Shetty has an undeniable screen presence that gets entirely wasted on two-minute phone calls and a final fight that feels edited by someone who had a train to catch.

Santosh Sivan's cinematography is glossy in that hyper-realized southern commercial style where every drop of rain looks like it was individually polished by a lighting technician, though there are moments during the foot chases through Dharavi where the handheld camera work gets so nauseatingly jittery that you lose track of who is punching whom. Anirudh Ravichander provides a score that relies heavily on brass instruments and a thumping bassline that hits every single time Rajinikanth adjusts his glasses or flicks his collar, though the songs themselves arrive at the absolute worst narrative junctures, grinding the momentum to a complete halt just as the police commissioner is about to raid a warehouse. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the background music swells with religious iconography every time the protagonist executes an unarmed suspect in an alleyway, treating state-sanctioned murder like a festival procession.

The film fancies itself an investigation into police brutality and the broken judicial system, but it treats due process as a minor bureaucratic annoyance to be bypassed with a roundhouse kick or a witty one-liner before the commercial break, which puts it somewhere between Dirty Harry and a very expensive tourism video for the Mumbai police department. We are supposed to care about the victims of crime, yet the camera lingers far longer on the contorted faces of the henchmen flying through breakaway glass than it ever does on the people the hero is supposedly avenging. This moral incoherence used to be a standard feature of commercial action cinema across India, but watching it now, especially after seeing how a film like Kaala handled the intersection of power and violence with actual psychological texture, Darbar feels remarkably hollow, a collection of fan-service moments stitched together with dental floss.

There is a sequence midway through where Rajinikanth interrogates a suspect by hanging him upside down from a crane over a construction site, and the movie plays this entire sequence as high comedy, complete with bouncy percussion and sound effects that belong in a cartoon, before cutting immediately back to a grim monologue about the rape statistics of the city. That tonal whiplash is everywhere in this project, a constant refusal to decide whether it wants to be a social message drama or a Saturday morning cartoon for adults who miss the nineties, and the result is a movie that exhausts you long before the intermission card drops. The supporting cast features a rotating collection of familiar faces who are trotted out only to deliver exposition or scream in terror, none of them given enough breathing room to establish an identity beyond their job title.

By the time the narrative limps toward its rushed conclusion involving an abandoned port and a needlessly complicated revenge plot, the energy has completely drained out of the frame, leaving behind just the sound of heavy breathing and the steady clack of ADR dialogue that was clearly recorded in an air-conditioned studio three weeks after principal photography wrapped. It is neither a complete disaster nor a forgotten classic, occupying that weird space of studio product that exists because financial quarters need to be closed and dates need to be filled, leaving the actors to carry the weight of a script that needed at least two more passes in the writers' room. You watch it for the star, obviously, because there will come a day when even the most stubborn believers have to admit that the knees can no longer take the landing, but Darbar makes you work harder for those tiny flashes of charisma than any movie starring a living legend should ever ask of its audience.