Subhash Ghai kept talking about how he found a diamond in the rough, which honestly made me sit through the opening twenty minutes with my arms crossed and a bad taste in my mouth. Kaanchi opens not with a whisper but with a brassy, deafening roar of CGI mountains and a frantic girl running through forests that look suspiciously like they were spray-painted in a Film City godown. The veteran filmmaker, once the undisputed showman of Hindi films who could command box office gold with mere ensemble casts and grand wedding songs, clearly wanted to recapture the sweeping populist energy of Karz while updating the formula for a harsher political climate. He missed by a mile, mostly because the man behind the camera has not looked at a contemporary newspaper since about 1998, leaving the screenplay stranded in a weird time warp where corrupt politicians still wear silk kurtas, twirl their moustaches while laughing in echo chambers, and quote Shakespearean villains to peasants who just stand there blinking.

The plot, if you can call a collection of random outrages strung together by voiceover narration a plot, follows an innocent hill girl whose life gets upended by power-drunk monsters in the state capital. There is a relentless barrage of rapes, murders, framed bomb blasts, and court cases that drag on with the dramatic urgency of a local train delay. Ghai and his co-writer Neeraj Pathak seem to think that piling on the misery equals high tragedy, but the sheer volume of trauma turns the narrative into a numbing parade of cruelty. It is loud, it is unsubtle, and it mistakes shouting for passion every single time the camera cuts to a new reaction shot. The editing by Amitabh Shukla often lingers two beats too long on Mishti weeping into the dust, draining the moment of any actual shock value because you saw the tear coming from the moment she took a deep breath three seconds earlier.

As the titular heroine, debutante Mishti tries her absolute best to sell the raw fury of a mountain woman out for vengeance, though she is severely hampered by dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a 1980s VHS cassette of a B-grade revenge drama. She has screen presence, sure, but the director demands she go from wide-eyed ingénue to stone-cold killer in the span of a single scene change without giving her the transitional beats to make the shift believable. Opposite her, Kartik Aaryan plays the loyal, puppy-dog boyfriend who follows her around like a lost shadow until he gets sidelined by the grand political conspiracy. Aaryan has this one specific smirk he deploys whenever he tries to look charmingly desperate, and while it worked reasonably well in Pyaar Ka Punchnama, here it just looks out of place amidst burning houses and heavy-handed speeches about civic duty.

Then you have Rishi Kapoor and Mithun Chakraborty chewing through the scenery like they wandered onto the wrong set after getting lost on their way to a lunch buffet. Kapoor plays a corrupt, sleazy politician with dyed grey hair and an unbuttoned collar, playing the hits with zero enthusiasm, relying entirely on hand gestures and booming laughter to convey evil. Chakraborty shows up as an eccentric, idealistic revolutionary living in a cave or a barn, painted in broad strokes of pseudo-patriotic martyrdom that feel embarrassing to watch. It is genuinely baffling to see two performers of such immense caliber reduce themselves to cartoon caricatures, reading lines about democracy and justice as if they are recording a public service announcement for an audience that doesn't exist.

The supporting cast fares even worse, especially the local police officers and cronies who all seem to have been dubbed by the exact same voice actor in a small suburban studio with a bad microphone. That vocal mismatch bugs you right away, pulling you out of the picture every time a henchman opens his mouth to threaten someone in a booming baritone that bears zero physical relation to his slight frame. The visual palette doesn't help either, oscillating between hyper-saturated pastel hues in the musical numbers and a sickly, yellow-tinted gloom during the dramatic confrontations that makes everything look like a forgotten soap opera pilot from late-night cable television.

Music is supposed to be the saving grace of any major studio production, but Ismail Darbaar and Salim-Sulaiman turn in a shockingly generic collection of tracks that refuse to stick in your head for more than five minutes after the projector stops. The background score blares constantly, telling you when to feel sad, when to feel angry, and when to cheer, treating the audience like children who cannot process emotion without a brass section cueing them in. One particular love song repeats the exact same melodic hook four times in a single ten-minute stretch, driving you slowly mad as the lovers frolic through plastic snow and fake pine trees that sway whenever a crew member walks past the wind machine off-screen.

There is an exhausting moral earnestness to the entire enterprise that prevents it from being a fun, so-bad-it's-good mess. It wants to be an important cinematic statement about women's empowerment and systemic corruption in modern India, but it handles those massive themes with the nuance of a sledgehammer swung by a toddler in a china shop. When you compare its clumsy political posturing to the cold, clinical devastation of a picture like No Smoking, you realize just how hopelessly archaic the grammar of mainstream Hindi cinema can be when it tries to address real-world anxieties without updating its worldview.

By the time the credits finally crawl up the screen, you are left with a dull headache and a profound sense of exhaustion, wondering why nobody in the editing suite had the courage to tell the legendary director that his time had passed. It is not an interesting failure or a brave swing and a miss, just a bloated, out-of-touch artifact of an ego unchecked by studio oversight or common sense. The small moments of unintended comedy offer temporary relief from the relentless misery, but even those wear thin long before the final reel finally sputters out into darkness.