Kangana Ranaut screams her lines in Revolver Rani with a throat-clearing rattle that sounds less like professional voice work and more like someone shouting over a generator at a roadside dhaba, which is honestly the exact right choice for a movie about people who shoot first and forget why they started arguing.

Sai Kabir writes and directs this mess with the kind of reckless abandon usually reserved for first-time filmmakers who have just discovered Tarantino and decided to set him loose in Gwalior, where the roads are dusty, the politicians are greasy, and everyone wears bright yellow aviators that catch the glare of a cruel afternoon sun. He structures the screenplay like a series of increasingly loud arguments between people who hate each other but are contractually obligated to share a Maruti Gypsy, jumping from genre satire to slapstick bloodbath without ever slowing down to check if the audience is still in the car, which they often aren't because the potholes are deep and the narrative alignment keeps shifting four inches to the left every time you think you've figured out where the scene is going.

Alka Alka's wardrobe department deserves a special medal or at least a stern warning for dressing Ranaut in a succession of leopard-print kurtas and heavily embroidered Gucci knockoffs that scream local gangster trying desperately to look like a Milan runway model during a bad fever dream, though it's a small thing that bugged me how her hair changes texture between cuts in the middle of a single rooftop gunfight. Vir Das plays Rohan Kapoor, a struggling reality TV star whose career trajectory resembles a damp piece of cardboard dropped in a puddle, and he brings a floppy, terrified energy to the proceedings that makes you wonder how he survived past the first fifteen minutes of the script, especially given that his character spends most of the runtime tied to a chair or running through mustard fields in silk underwear while various people shoot at his kneecaps.

The cinematography by Sahil Ansari loves saturated colors and muddy browns in equal measure, sliding the camera across dusty courtyards and dimly lit motel rooms with a swagger that sometimes forgets to keep the actors in focus, though that grainy, unpolished look suits a world where nobody has clean fingernails or good dental work. Piyush Mishra as Maaji, the smooth-talking patriarch with a fondness for milk and murder, plays his scenes with a terrifying, dead-eyed calm that reminds you of his work in Gangs of Wasseypur, except here he is surrounded by cartoon violence and characters who occasionally burst into song for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are in a Hindi movie and the contractual obligations of musical numbers die hard even in the middle of a political assassination.

There is a distinct lack of narrative discipline that keeps dragging the middle act down into a mire of repetitive gags involving kidnappings gone wrong and local police officers who look like they wandered off the set of a Doordarshan serial from 1994, and while this chaotic energy works wonders for the first forty minutes, it eventually wears out its welcome when the plot demands that characters make decisions so profoundly stupid that even the actors look confused while reading their dialogue off-camera.

Tigmanshu Dhulia pops up as a rival politician with a penchant for poetic threats, and his brief scenes provide a nice anchor of gravity that the rest of the cast treats like a suggestion rather than a rule, chewing through their regional profanities with an appetite that suggests they haven't eaten since the morning call sheet. It is a loud, messy specimen of modern Bollywood cinema that refuses to play by the rules of conventional narrative structure, opting instead for a sprawling, disjointed rhythm that will alienate anyone looking for clean three-act plotting or likable protagonists who learn a lesson by the time the credits roll.

Nitish Tej Ahuja's production design leans hard into the tacky aesthetics of small-town political offices, filling every frame with peeling political posters, cracked plastic chairs, and oversized portraits of leaders whose eyes follow you around the room with mild disappointment, which feels appropriate for a story about people whose ambitions far outweigh their capacity to govern a local pan shop. The background score rattles your teeth with heavy brass and distorted electric guitars that occasionally drown out the dialogue, a mixing choice that feels deliberate, as if the sound engineers knew the words weren't always worth hearing anyway.

Hindi films have a long and storied tradition of romanticizing rural outlaws, but Kabir and his team strip away any lingering Robin Hood charm and replace it with a petty, small-minded viciousness that makes all these characters deeply unpleasant to spend two hours with, which is probably why the movie tanked at the box office when people realized they were paying ticket prices to watch unlikable people yell at each other in a dirt yard.

Ranaut manages to anchor this swirling vortex of bad decisions through sheer force of will, glaring down the barrel of the camera with an unhinged intensity that makes you forgive the plot holes and the slack pacing for at least ten minutes at a time, before the script wanders off into another pointless subplot about local elections and stolen tractors that brings the whole enterprise grinding back to a halt.

When the violence hits, it's messy and unheroic, bodies tumbling off balconies with dull thuds instead of cinematic grace, and that commitment to unglamorous ugliness is perhaps the most interesting thing about an otherwise exhausting picture that doesn't quite know when to put the gun down and go home.