The dubbing on the side characters during the station shootout is just slightly out of sync. It is a small thing, sure, but once you catch it, the echo of the voice actor's booth follows you right through the first half hour. You hear the line click a fraction of a second before the jaw moves. John Frankenheimer would have fixed that in the mix, though maybe that is an unfair pull from the shelf.

John Matthew Matthan did not come out of nowhere exactly, but he did not have the glossy pedigree of the usual suspects making prestige Hindi films in the late nineties. He spent years researching actual police files before writing the script. That groundwork shows in the procedural weight given to wiretaps and jurisdiction battles. When Aamir Khan’s ACP Ajay Singh Rathod sits in a dusty basement office listening to reel-to-reel tapes of cross-border arms dealers, the camera stays still. It does not tilt for drama. It just watches the dials spin while two constables argue over a stale cup of tea.

Aamir was coming off a weird stretch where he was trying on different hats every six months, bouncing between slapstick and heavy melodrama without quite finding his lane, and here he strips all the usual movie-star tics down to almost nothing. He wears oversized trousers and a perpetual scowl. His eyes look tired in a way that suggests he has not slept since the intermission. When he interrogates a suspect in a cramped lockup, he does not yell or slam tables. He leans in close and speaks in a low, flat murmur that forces everyone else in the room to stop breathing. It is an internal performance, almost uncomfortably contained, refusing the grand gestures usually expected from a lead in a mainstream action picture.

Opposite him, Naseeruddin Shah plays a ghazal singer named Gulfam Hassan with a terrifying, silken charm. Gulfam is the sort of man who can quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz while casually orchestrating logistical supply chains for assassins. Shah does not play him as a villain in the mustache-twirling tradition of older Bollywood movies. He gives him a weary sophistication, an expatriate's quiet sorrow that makes his treason feel all the more cold. Their scenes together on a veranda in Delhi, drinking tea while trading veiled insults about poetry and patriotism, carry more tension than any of the gunfire later on. It is a cat-and-mouse game played with loaded teaspoons and polite smiles.

Sonali Bendre gets the short end of the stick as the mandatory love interest who exists mostly to ask questions about Rathod’s day and look concerned near potted plants. She is fine with what she has, but the romance subplot feels bolted on with heavy-duty rivets. Whenever the film grinds to a halt for a romantic number in a field of yellow flowers, you can feel the momentum leaking out of the tires. It is the kind of mandatory box-checking that even decent thrillers of that era struggled to outrun. The songs themselves are fine, composed by Jatin-Lalit, but the placement interrupts the procedural grit that Matthan does so much better than the standard song-and-dance formula.

The cinematography by Ishwar Bidri relies on a lot of natural light and washed-out blues that make the interiors of police stations look genuinely depressing. There is no neon slickness here. The streets of Mumbai and the dusty border towns of Rajasthan feel hot, crowded, and sweaty. The action sequences are staged with a clumsy, violent realism that avoids wirework and gravity-defying leaps. When a man gets shot, he simply collapses into the dirt instead of spinning through the air in slow motion. That grounded approach extends to the script's politics, which lean hard into nationalist urgency without completely falling over into shouting propaganda, though it definitely walks right up to the line more than once.

What keeps the whole thing together is the pacing of the investigation. Matthan lets scenes breathe for an extra five seconds after the dialogue ends, letting silence do the heavy lifting. A constable finds a ledger. He turns a page. He looks up at Rathod. Cut to the next scene. No dramatic musical sting telling you to feel shocked. Just the mundane machinery of police work grinding forward through bureaucratic red tape and stubborn informants. It reminds you of how rare it is for commercial Hindi movies to treat intelligence gathering as something other than a montage of computer screens flashing red text.

There is a specific scene late in the second half where Rathod confronts his superior officer over a botched raid. The lighting is harsh fluorescent overhead, bouncing off greasy hair and cheap desk laminate. No one raises their voice. The camera holds on a close-up of a fountain pen rolling back and forth across a blotter. It is not a flashy moment, and it will not make any highlight reels, but it grounds the movie in a reality that most action thrillers are too impatient to build.

The climax takes place at a dusty railway station where the logistical puzzle finally snaps shut with a satisfying click. Guns go off, bodies drop, and Rathod catches his breath against a concrete pillar with a bloody shoulder. He does not deliver a grand closing monologue about the nation or the flag. He just looks down at his boots, spits some dust, and asks someone to hand him his radio so he can call in the cleanup crew.