Mohommed Ali Shah clears his throat in that specific way actors do when they know the camera is tracking a medium-close shot and they need to look busy before the dialogue drops. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he did it throughout Tigmanshu Dhulia's Yaara, which is often enough to keep you counting. Bollywood movies have a long history of trying to dress up old genre tropes in the frayed denim of gritty regional realism, and this particular adaptation of the French film Les Lyonnais feels like it was put together from spare parts left behind in a editing suite somewhere in Andheri. The narrative hops back and forth between two distinct decades with the grace of a drunk uncle trying to clear a garden hedge, leaving the viewer to piece together who is shooting at whom and why we are supposed to care about these aging outlaws turning on each other over a briefcase that looks like it cost less than fifty rupees.

Dhulia can usually be relied upon to wring sweat and desperation out of period crime dramas, but here the staging feels strangely hollow. The action sequences look rushed, blocked out with the hasty efficiency of a television soap opera that needs to hit its daily quota before the sun goes down. When the central gang of four friends—the Chaukhigh Gang, as they are grandly called—sit around drinking cheap whiskey and talking about loyalty, the camera lingers too long on reaction shots of empty glasses and flickering lanterns. It is the sort of directorial laziness that assumes visual gloom equals depth, forgetting that lighting a scene so dark you can barely make out the actors' noses does not automatically create atmosphere. It just makes you reach for the brightness control on your monitor.

Shruti Haasan shows up as Sukhi, though calling her a character is being generous to a script that treats women as decorative furniture that occasionally delivers an exposition dump before vanishing for forty minutes. She does what she can with a part that requires her to look brooding against various stone walls, but the performance never catches fire because she has nobody to bounce off of who isn't shouting their lines. Compare her presence here to her work in D-Day, where she actually got to sink her teeth into some genuine moral ambiguity instead of just being the designated romantic anchor for men who make terrible life choices. Imran Hasnee fares a bit better as the jittery fixer caught between shifting political tides, bringing a twitchy, lived-in nervous energy to scenes that would otherwise dissolve into sheer boredom.

The cinematography relies on a washed-out sepia filter for the flashback sequences that suggests someone dropped the hard drive into a vat of weak tea. It is an aesthetic choice that stopped being interesting around the time Gangs of Wasseypur hit theaters and showed everyone how to shoot dust and blood with actual texture. The soundtrack arrives unannounced with heavy electric guitars whenever someone cocks a pistol, a compositional crutch that becomes exhausting by the midpoint. Hindi films have this persistent habit of using background score as an emotional battering ram, shoving the audience toward feelings the script has not earned the right to harvest.

Beneath the bluster of gunfights and betrayal, the movie attempts to grapple with the fading ideals of the emergency era and how political corruption hollows out youthful rebellion. The trouble is that Dhulia treats these political undercurrents as mere wallpaper for a standard brotherhood-in-crisis melodrama. The transition from idealistic student activists to cynical mercenaries happens off-screen between two reel changes, robbing the central tragedy of any real weight. You hear characters talk about the ideals they used to share, but you never see the spark that supposedly bound them together in the first place, leaving the emotional core of the film completely vacant.

By the time the final confrontation crawls onto the screen in a dusty godown that has hosted a thousand similar shootouts in previous Hindi movies, the fatigue has set in so deeply that even the sound of gunfire feels muffled and routine. Shah delivers his final monologue with the veins in his neck standing out like thick ropes, but it is too little, too late for a picture that lost its pulse somewhere in the second reel. It is not a complete disaster of a viewing experience, if I'm honest, just an aggressively average way to spend two hours of an afternoon when you have nothing better to do. The closing credits roll over a generic folk-rock track that fades out mid-note, which feels entirely appropriate for a project that stops trying long before it actually finishes.