There is a specific kind of exhale that happens in a screening room about twenty minutes into a certain type of action picture, right around the moment the hero has to outrun an explosion that is clearly happening on a soundstage in Goregaon, and if I'm honest, I let out a long one during Ruslaan.

Aayush Sharma throws himself across the frame with the heavy dedication of a man who understands that every single muscle fibre needs to communicate lethal efficiency, though he sometimes forgets to let his face do any reacting while his biceps are busy saving the Republic from men who look like they wandered off the set of a prestige streaming thriller about cryptocurrency. He is trying to build a persona out of sheer velocity and quiet stares, leaning into the kind of stoic brooding that worked so well for John Abraham in Madras Cafe before things got terribly muddy and every single dialogue exchange had to be delivered at a deafening roar.

Director Karan L. Butani tries to keep the energy high by cutting between three different geographical locations during every single gunfight, which makes it nearly impossible to figure out who is shooting at whom or why a warehouse in Uzbekistan looks suspiciously like an abandoned mill near Mumbai. The screenplay relies on exposition drops that are delivered by actors standing rigidly in front of slate-grey walls, speaking in tones of hushed urgency that suggest they are discussing national security secrets rather than the fact that the protagonist's adoptive father has a dark past involving rogue intelligence cells and a missing hard drive. It's a small thing but it bugged me how every single computer monitor in the agency headquarters displayed the exact same looping red graphic of a globe spinning backward, as if the art department had a hard deadline and zero interest in what an actual operations room looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.

Jagapathi Babu brings a tired, weathered authority to his role that grounds scenes he isn't even in, because the camera loves his stillness and cuts to him whenever the dialogue gets too bogged down in tactical jargon about extraction points and asset management. He plays the mentor figure with a gravelly murmur that makes you wish the whole movie had just followed his character around doing paperwork instead of dragging everyone into international territory for a fistfight on top of a shipping container that is swaying so unnaturally against a green screen you can practically hear the VFX supervisor weeping off-camera. Vidya Malvade wanders through this chaos with a sharp, no-nonsense professionalism that deserved a better script, giving her lines about protocol and compromised agents an anchor of believability that the surrounding pyrotechnics keep trying to blow out of the water.

The cinematography by Sameer Arya loves a good cold-blue filter, casting every indoor conversation in the icy tones of an air-conditioned corporate office, which drains the warmth out of the few dramatic beats the narrative attempts to land before sprinting toward the next set piece. Meanwhile, the background score crashes against the dialogue with the subtlety of a falling grand piano, hammering every emotional pivot point so hard that you start to wonder if the sound mixer was worried the audience might drift off during the quiet moments where two characters discuss their complicated loyalties over lukewarm chai in a plastic cup.

Hindi movies have a long and storied tradition of these globe-trotting vigilante yarns where the plot is mostly just an excuse for a man in a tight black t-shirt to leap over a speeding car, but Ruslaan rarely finds the loose-limbed joy that made earlier iterations of this formula actually work when the stakes were low and the hair gel was heavy. Richard Bhakti Klein pops up as the kind of sneering foreign heavy who exists solely to get thrown through a dry-wall partition, and he plays it with a broad, theatrical glee that stands out in a picture otherwise populated by people taking themselves with absolute, leaden seriousness.

There is no grand statement being made here about modern geopolitics or the psychology of the soldier who goes rogue because the system failed him, just a series of loud collisions and narrow escapes strung together by actors who look like they are checking their watches between takes. Bollywood has certainly produced shinier exercises in muscle-bound patriotism over the last decade, but this one has a scrappy, disjointed earnestness that prevents it from feeling entirely mechanical even when the third act devolves into a blur of slow-motion knife fights in a dimly lit hangar.

The pacing lurches violently whenever the narrative attempts to slow down for a flashback, dragging the momentum to a complete halt just as the action was starting to find a decent rhythm, before kicking back into gear with another chase sequence through crowded alleyways that look remarkably devoid of actual pedestrians. You leave the theater thinking less about the grand design of the espionage plot and more about how hard those stunt doubles were working to make a routine hallway brawl look like a matter of life and death, which is probably the intended effect anyway.