That weird lens flare during the opening montage keeps catching the corner of the frame when it has no business being there, and if I am honest, it set my teeth on edge before the title card even dropped. Rajkumar Santoshi has made better movies than Halla Bol, though maybe he hasn't made one this loud about being important. You sit there in the dark watching Ajay Devgan throw himself across the screen as a struggling theatre actor who somehow morphs into a massive movie star, and you wonder if the script was written with a megaphone. Devgan plays Sameer, or maybe he plays Ashfaque, because the whole point is that the man on the billboard and the boy from the chawl are supposed to be at war inside one skull. It is a messy premise that requires a whole lot of shouting to make its points land, which they usually do with the subtlety of a falling anvil. Santoshi directs like a man who just read his first pamphlet on civil disobedience and wants to make sure the guy in the back row gets the message. The screenplay lunges from broad backstage comedy to grim street violence without bothering to build any bridges between the two moods. You get these long, unbroken takes of theatre rehearsals that feel genuinely lived-in, followed immediately by melodramatic confrontations that belong in a completely different century of hindi films. It is the kind of project where the seams show constantly, every gear and pulley grinding away right out in the open for anyone to spot.

Pankaj Kapoor chews up whatever scenery isn't bolted down, playing Siddhu, the idealistic guru who runs a street theatre troupe with a faded red banner and zero budget. Kapoor does this thing with his shoulders, slightly hitched and stiff, that tells you everything about a lifetime of compromise before he even opens his mouth to deliver a monologue. Then there is Vidya Balan as Sneha, the wife who watches her husband sell out his principles for jumbo-sized sunglasses and vanity trailers with air conditioning. Balan doesn't have a whole lot to do besides look disappointed in soft focus, but she manages to invest those tired reaction shots with a quiet exhaustion that makes you wish the movie trusted her silence more often. Ajay Devgan handles the transition from scruffy idealist to pampered superstar with a heavy, bruised presence that works well enough when he is just staring blankly at his own face on a massive hoarding. Kareena Kapoor pops up as herself in a cameo that feels like it was filmed during a lunch break on another lot entirely, wearing clothes that cost more than the entire set design of Siddhu's plays. Mukesh Tiwari and Darshan Jariwala mill about in the background playing various shades of industry sleaze and corrupt politicians, shouting their dialogue with a vein popping out of the temple that starts to look painful around the second reel. It reminds me a bit of Govind Nihalani's Dry Day in the way it handles the gradual corruption of an artist by commercial pressures, though Santoshi lacks Nihalani's eye for the slow rot. Everyone on screen is sweating profusely, whether they are standing under studio lights or out on a dusty Delhi street, and after twenty minutes you start sweating right along with them just from the sheer volume of the performance style.

The cinematography by Santosh Thundiyil relies way too heavily on amber filters and slow-motion shots of Devgan walking away from burning cars, which feels derivative even for bollywood movies from that era. Every time Sameer has an epiphany about his lost soul, the camera circles him like a vulture while the background music swells into a synthetic choir that drowns out whatever the actor is actually saying. Speaking of the soundtrack, the background score by Bappi Lahiri and various guest composers hits the exact same five-note brass motif every single time a character contemplates their own hypocrisy. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time—that identical brass hit returning like a bad dental appointment. The songs themselves arrive at random intervals, derailing whatever narrative momentum the scene was trying to build, forcing Devgan and a backup dancer to hoof it across desert landscapes that look like they were rendered on an early home computer. Ruby Bhatia has a brief, deeply weird turn as a television anchor who asks the kind of leading questions that only exist in screenplays, her hair sprayed into a helmet that never moves even when the studio lights start sparking. Lekh Tandon shows up as an aging director who dispenses wisdom over a cup of lukewarm tea, providing the sort of comforting nostalgia that the movie usually claims to despise. Nobody in this world seems to have an interior life that isn't externalized through a megaphone or a poorly dubbed line reading, because subtlety is treated here as a personal insult to the ticket buyer.

Underneath the shouting and the melodramatic set-pieces, the film is obsessed with the idea that the public is complicit in its own oppression, which is a fairly heavy pill for a mainstream star vehicle to ask an audience to swallow. Sameer witnesses a murder outside a crowded nightclub while drunk, surrounded by other celebrities and wealthy socialites who refuse to call the police because it might ruin the vibe of the party. It is the central hinge of the plot, and Santoshi shoots it with a grim, claustrophobic intensity that almost makes you forget how silly the setup was. The killers are rich, connected, and entirely untouchable, backed by politicians who view human life as a minor line item in their campaign budget. This brings us to the uncomfortable intersection where hindi cinema tries to critique the very power structures that finance its lavish productions, resulting in a strange kind of ideological vertigo. The rich are cartoonishly evil, pouring champagne over each other while plotting assassinations, while the poor are endlessly noble, dying in muddy alleys with poetry on their lips. It is an old, tired dichotomy that bollywood has been recycling since the seventies, yet here it is again, wearing a fresh coat of digital paint and starring an action hero who usually spends his weekends punching five guys at once through plywood walls. The ideological engine sputters whenever it tries to suggest that art can actually change political realities, because the movie itself is a commercial product designed to make back its budget through satellite rights and opening weekend collections.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around—and I know I said I wouldn't do the traditional wrap-up, but bear with me—Sameer is standing in the middle of a dusty courtyard covered in stage blood and fake sweat, delivering a ten-minute speech about civic duty that feels less like drama and more like a civics lecture delivered by an angry uncle at a wedding. The supporting cast gathers around him in a semicircle, nodding solemnly as if they are listening to the Gettysburg Address rather than a collection of warmed-over socialist slogans. It is earnest to a fault, completely devoid of irony, and that sincerity is simultaneously its worst enemy and its only saving grace. You can roll your eyes at the heavy-handed symbolism of the theatre curtain coming down to separate the righteous from the corrupt, but you also have to respect a filmmaker who is willing to be this aggressively uncool in public. Ajay Devgan stares straight down the barrel of the lens with those deadpan eyes, looking like he wants to go home and take a nap, and honestly, after two hours of listening to people scream about the death of conscience, you completely understand where he is coming from.