Sarah Barlondo wears a trench coat in this movie that looks entirely too stiff for the humidity of the locations, and I couldn't stop staring at the collar crease during the interrogation scene in the second reel. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the film asks you to buy into a certain gritty procedural authenticity while the wardrobe department clearly shopped at a pristine department store outlet the day before shooting commenced. Bollywood usually leans heavily into either blindingly expensive glitz or dirt-caked misery, but Detective Sherdil sits in a weird middle zone where everything is just slightly too clean to feel lived-in yet too scuffed to be glamorous. Diljit Dosanjh plays the title role with his usual charm dialed down to a low simmer, trading his signature grinning charisma for a tired slouch that makes him look like he would rather be anywhere else on earth than chasing suspects through a crowded marketplace. He brings an exhaustion to the part that isn't strictly in the screenplay, filling in the gaps left by dialogue scenes that end three beats before they should.

The direction by whoever was behind the monitor—the credits fly past so fast you barely catch the name—relies on endless drone shots of city rooftops that look like stock footage pulled straight from a library CD. We cut from a close-up of a sweaty forehead directly to a wide establishing shot of a bridge at dusk, a rhythm that gets old about four times before the intermission hits. Mike Capozzola shows up as the corporate heavy with an accent that shifts slightly depending on whether he is threatening someone in English or whispering instructions in a local dialect, which is a bit distracting if you are paying attention to the audio track. The screenplay feels like it was rewritten seven times by different people who never spoke to each other, resulting in subplots about land developer fraud and missing diamond shipments that crash into one another with zero momentum. It reminds me a bit of Bombay Velvet in the way it spends so much time establishing period mood while forgetting to construct an actual mystery worth solving.

Yet there are stretches where the film clicks into gear simply because the actors refuse to let the leaden pacing sink the ship. Barlondo handles her exposition-heavy monologues with a deadpan precision that keeps you from laughing at lines about quantum ledger hacks and offshore bank accounts. Hindi movies have a long history of turning investigators into either infallible superheroes or bumbling comic relief, and Sherdil tries to split the difference by making the hero chronically late and terrible at paperwork. When he loses his car keys in a drainage ditch right in the middle of a high-speed foot chase, it injects a dose of low-stakes reality that grounds the nonsense happening around him. The soundtrack, composed of three different producers working independently, lurches from synthetic trap beats to traditional dhol drums with zero regard for emotional continuity.

The central thematic tug-of-war tries to pit modern corporate greed against old-school neighborhood loyalty, but it gets bogged down in endless scenes of people standing in glass-walled boardrooms arguing over percentage points. You can practically hear the sound design straining to make Excel spreadsheets sound menacing with deep sub-bass drops every time a cursor clicks on a pie chart. It's not great, not bad, just there, taking up two hours of your afternoon without leaving much of a bruise once the credits finally crawl up the screen. The cinematography loves a teal-and-orange color grading scheme so aggressively applied that even the bowls of fruit on office desks look like they were dipped in copper wire. Dosanjh has a nice moment near the end where he simply sits on a curb and eats a bag of roasted peanuts while waiting for a tow truck, completely ignoring the villains who are presumably fleeing the jurisdiction, and that casual disregard for narrative urgency is the best thing the movie has going for it.