Katrina Kaif wearing a towel while roundhouse kicking a man across a pristine hotel bathroom is the exact kind of image that makes you wonder what kind of insurance policy the producers had to take out, or if logic simply went on holiday the day they blocked that specific fight choreography.

Tiger 3 drops us right back into the messy geopolitical sandbox of the Spy Universe without offering much in the way of a handrail. Maneesh Sharma takes over directing duties from Ali Abbas Zafar, and the shift is immediately noticeable in how much darker and somehow dustier everything looks, trading the sun-bleached expanses of previous outings for claustrophobic corridors and dingy safe houses that smell distinctly of stale tobacco. There is an overreliance on muddy digital grading during the early setup scenes, making half of Vienna look like it was filmed inside a soot-stained fireplace, which is a weird aesthetic choice for a franchise usually defined by its slick, glossy poster-ready sheen.

Salman Khan plays Tiger with the weary, heavy-lidded detachment of an aging contractor who keeps getting called back to fix a plumbing job he finished five years ago. He does not run when he can stride, and he rarely changes his expression beyond a mild, long-suffering squint that suggests someone just asked him to explain the tax code. It works, mostly, because the movie leans into his physical immobility rather than fighting it, staging entire action beats around the idea that he is simply too heavy and too tired to be moved by anyone under thirty. If I'm honest, half the time he looks like he'd rather be taking a nap in his trailer, but there is still an undeniable, weird gravity to the way he fills a frame when he finally decides to throw a punch.

Emraan Hashmi shows up as Aatish, the rogue ISI agent with a personal grudge and a wardrobe full of aggressively tailored leather jackets that somehow never get a scratch on them no matter how many grenades go off nearby. Hashmi brings a quiet, simmering malice that feels genuinely dangerous compared to the moustache-twirling cartoon villains usually populating this corner of the cinematic map, giving the film a much-needed antagonist who doesn't need to shout his motivations across a boardroom table. He shares a handful of tense, dialogue-heavy standoffs with Khan where both men are clearly trying to out-stare each other while waiting for the cue to start throwing stunt doubles through drywall, and surprisingly, the energy holds up.

Revathy replaces Shefali Shah in the agency chair, bringing an institutional fatigue to her brief scenes that grounds the absurd plotting in something resembling actual workplace stress. She doesn't get much to do besides stand in front of a bank of glowing monitors and look deeply disappointed in everybody's life choices, but she does it with an authority that makes you wish the script gave her half as much narrative weight as it gives to the endless motorcycle chases.

Then there is Katrina Kaif, who continues to do the heavy lifting for the franchise's stunt credibility while everyone else is busy posing for the slow-motion cameras. Her extended towel-fight sequence in a Turkish hammam is absurd, completely impractical, and executed with a level of brutal, bone-crunching precision that puts most of the male-led action cinema currently coming out of Hindi films to absolute shame. She moves with a predatory fluidity that makes the surrounding explosions and collapsing masonry look like background noise, anchoring the film's increasingly chaotic third act whenever the plot threatens to dissolve into a muddy soup of generic flag-waving.

The screenplay feels constructed by a committee of people working in separate rooms who only communicated via sticky notes left on a coffee machine. Plot points are introduced, resolved, and completely forgotten within the span of a single reel, such as an entire subplot involving a kidnapped politician's daughter who vanishes from the narrative so abruptly you almost expect a missing person poster to pop up in the background. It is a loud, messy contraption that constantly pauses its own momentum to remind us about family values, national duty, and the enduring power of cross-border romance, as if the director was terrified we might forget we were watching a mainstream production designed to appeal to every demographic simultaneously.

A particular supporting actor playing a high-ranking intelligence official is so obviously dubbed by a voice artist reading lines in a completely dead acoustic booth that every time he opens his mouth, the illusion of the scene shatters into a million tiny, frustrating pieces. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he appeared on screen, draining the tension right out of rooms where characters were supposedly discussing matters of grave international security.

Cinematographer Anay Goswamy occasionally manages to capture something striking in the midst of the digital sludge, particularly during a foot chase across the rooftops of Saint Petersburg that uses natural light to carve out harsh, geometric shadows across the actors' faces. But too much of the visual language relies on shaky-cam setups that obscure the geography of the fights rather than enhancing them, a trick borrowed from the Bourne franchise that feels tired here. The soundtrack by Pritam and Vishal Dadlani does its job without leaving much of a footprint, though a recurring orchestral motif for the villain sounds suspiciously like a slowed-down version of the theme from The Dark Knight mixed with a melancholy flute.

There is a recurring ideological anxiety running underneath all the gunfights and fistfights, an awkward attempt to modernize the traditional cross-border spy drama by suggesting that ordinary citizens on both sides just want peace while corrupt politicians ruin everything. It sits uneasily alongside the hyper-nationalistic chest-thumping that defines the climax, creating a weird tonal dissonance where characters spend five minutes talking about shared humanity before blowing up a helicopter full of faceless mercenaries without a second thought. This kind of ideological hedging is common in contemporary Bollywood movies, where filmmakers try to have their political cake and eat it too by nodding toward universal brotherhood while still delivering the requisite explosions.

If you stripped away the IP baggage and the massive marketing campaign, Tiger 3 would still be a largely incoherent, intermittently thrilling action picture that doesn't quite know when to stop talking and start hitting. It is nowhere near as tight or focused as Ek Tha Tiger was over a decade ago, suffering from the bloat that inevitably consumes any successful franchise once the budgets triple and the studio notes start arriving by the truckload. Yet it stumbles into moments of genuine cinematic spectacle purely by accident, relying on the sheer star power of its leads to drag its collapsing narrative across the finish line.

The closing sequence features a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan that brings the house down not because it makes any narrative sense, but because watching two aging megastars share a witty exchange while firing automatic weapons at an army of bad guys still carries a potent, nostalgic charge for anyone who grew up watching these faces dominate the big screen. It is completely shameless fan service, lacking any real stakes or narrative justification, yet it provides the exact jolt of adrenaline the movie desperately needed twenty minutes earlier. When the dust finally settles and the credits roll over a bombastic remix of the main theme, you are left feeling a bit battered, slightly confused, and weirdly okay with having spent two and a half hours watching very attractive people run through burning buildings for no adequately explained reason.