Sunil Grover’s character speaks with this weird, manufactured nasal rasp that sounds like someone yelling through a cardboard tube, and if I’m honest, it set my teeth on edge about ten minutes before the plot even bothered to introduce itself. We are supposed to take him as this comic-relief heavy who anchors the protagonist’s early days in a Kerala martial arts academy, but the audio mixing is so aggressively flat that every time he opens his mouth you can hear the distinct acoustic deadness of a dubbing studio in Andheri. Bollywood movies have always had an uneven relationship with post-production sound work, yet this particular vocal track feels pasted onto the actor’s face with industrial glue. It distracts from the scenery, which is lush and rain-slicked and genuinely photogenic in that glossy studio way where every leaf looks like it was wiped down with vegetable oil before the crane shot rolled. That is where we meet Ronny, played by Tiger Shroff with the stoic, slightly vacant intensity of a young boy who has been told he is very good at push-ups and has built his entire personality around that singular validation. He moves through the frame like a coiled spring that someone forgot to lubricate, stiff and impressive and strangely hollow all at once.

Director Sabbir Khan treats the screenplay like an obstacle course designed purely to get from one bare-chested brawl to the next without getting bogged down in character motivation or common sense. There is a narrative backbone here involving a rebel fighting style and a kidnapped girl named Sia, played by Shraddha Kapoor with a breezy, superficial charm that works well enough until she has to cry on cue and the performance simply evaporates into thin air. Kapoor has this habit of dropping her chin and staring intensely into the middle distance whenever the script demands emotional gravity, which happens with alarming frequency given that most scenes are just excuses for people to yell at each other in crowded courtyards. The script borrows heavily from The Raid and various old-school Shaw Brothers joints, though it lacks the architectural geometry that made those fight sequences feel like brutal, escalating logic puzzles. Instead, we get a lot of shaky-cam coverage and aggressive editing that tries to hide the fact that nobody involved quite knows how to pace a three-minute combat exchange without resorting to slow-motion close-ups of Tiger Shroff’s abs catching the studio lights just right.

Sudheer Babu shows up as the primary antagonist, Raghav, sporting a haircut that looks like it cost a lot of money to look that greasy and a sneer that never quite reaches his eyes. He is supposed to be this terrifying, untouchable underworld figure who runs an illegal fighting ring out of a decaying industrial compound in Bangkok, but he mostly just paces around high-end concrete offices looking mildly annoyed that someone tracking mud onto his imported floor tiles. When he and Shroff finally square off in the climax, the physical contrast is mildly interesting because Babu actually moves with a lean, wiry viciousness that makes the choreography pop far more than it has any right to. But the film keeps cutting away to flashbacks of Kapoor tossing wet leaves at Shroff in slow motion, draining all the kinetic momentum out of a sequence that should have just been twenty minutes of uninterrupted bone-crunching violence. It is a pacing disease common to many contemporary Hindi films, this obsession with dragging the past into the present even when the present has an actor kicking someone through a stack of hollow-core doors.

Cinematographer Binod Pradhan shoots the action with a glossy, high-contrast palette that makes the mud and blood look almost appetizing, like dark chocolate drizzled over a stunt double’s shoulder. The soundtrack, composed by a rotating committee of hit-makers, hits you over the head with identical mid-tempo romantic ballads that all use the exact same acoustic guitar strum in the opening bars. There is a specific song that plays during a train journey which recurs at least four times throughout the narrative, sometimes as a hummed motif, sometimes as a full-throated playback track, and by the third iteration, you start praying for the silence of a punch to the face. The choreography in these musical numbers is miles ahead of the dramatic scenes, giving Shroff a chance to spin and backflip across rooftops while background dancers form precise geometric shapes behind him with the efficiency of a military drill team. Yet these moments exist in a completely separate cinematic universe from the grim, revenge-driven plot that surrounds them, creating a tonal whiplash that leaves you feeling mildly concussed.

The ideological underpinnings of the story are fascinatingly blunt, operating on a moral universe where punching people until they stop moving is the highest form of spiritual expression. Ronny’s martial arts master preaches discipline and inner peace while literally beating his students with thick wooden sticks, a contradiction the film accepts with a straight face that borders on the surreal. When the action shifts to Thailand, the local police are depicted as either comically corrupt or utterly useless, leaving our protagonist to dispense street-level justice with the casual indifference of a man clearing leaves out of his gutter. Hindi movies have relied on this lone-vigilante template for decades, yet this iteration strips away any remaining pretense of social commentary or institutional critique, reducing the hero's journey to a pure, unadulterated logistical problem of how to enter a ten-story building and kick everyone on every floor. The supporting cast populates the background as screaming hostages or faceless thugs who exist only to be drop-kicked through plate-glass windows, leaving no room for anyone besides the two leads to register as actual human beings.

Tiger Shroff remains an actor who demands to be watched strictly in profile, where his jawline can do the heavy lifting that his line readings consistently refuse to attempt. He has a physical presence that is undeniable and occasionally hypnotic during the high-flying combat beats, but the moment he has to express sorrow or rage using only his face, the performance stalls out completely. Shraddha Kapoor fares slightly better simply because she is given less to do besides look pretty and occasionally scream for help in a high-stress environment. The supporting players are treated like furniture that occasionally stands up and delivers an expository couplet before getting thrown down a flight of concrete stairs. It’s a loud, stupid, aggressively manufactured product that never pretends to be anything other than a vehicle for some impressive kicks and a few glossy overseas locations. You leave the theater with a slight headache from the mixing on the bass tracks and the vague realization that you just watched two hours of choreography interrupted by a movie.