Katrina Kaif is holding a baby in the back of an SUV and she still manages to look like she just stepped off a billboard in Bandra, which is probably why half the hall whistled during her first close-up even though she is technically playing a doctor married to a bomb squad specialist who has zero time for her clinic hours. That is just how Rohit Shetty operates his sets, keeping everything polished to a blinding glare where nobody ever sweats through their linen shirts unless a timer on a detonator is hitting the final three seconds. Akshay Kumar plays Veer Sooryavanshi, an ATS officer with a permanent squint and a penchant for leaping off moving motorcycles onto the hoods of imported sedans without scuffing his loafers. If I'm honest, the stunt work gets a bit repetitive by the third warehouse raid. It's a small thing but it bugged me how every single villain wears the exact same black cargo pants from a generic costume house in Goregaon. The script by Yunus Sajawal treats geography like a suggestion, jumping from Mumbai to Bangkok to a fictional border town with the breathless logic of a hyperactive teenager flipping through comic books after school. You get car crashes that cost more than small housing developments, yet the dialogue scenes between investigations feel like they were hammered out on a Blackberry during a lunch break.

There is a specific kind of noisy confidence to how Shetty structures his action sequences that separates them from the grim, shaky-cam aesthetic borrowed by half the filmmakers working in Hindi films today. He likes space, wide lenses, and primary colors that hit the back row of single-screen theatres just as clearly as they do on IMAX screens. When Sooryavanshi and his squad clear out a sleeper cell in a dilapidated textile mill, the choreography has a crisp geometry that reminds you of how subcontinental action used to look before every second director decided to shoot fights in the dark with a nausea-inducing shutter angle. But then Ajay Devgn shows up as Singham in a police helicopter, blowing past logic and altitude restrictions just to deliver a punchline about jurisdiction, and the movie immediately tilts back into cartoon territory. Akshay handles the tonal whiplash better than his co-stars because he has been doing this exact brand of hyper-nationalist paternalism since the nineties, leaning into his wholesome-uncle persona while breaking collarbones with a metal pipe. His chemistry with Katrina is non-existent, mostly because she exists primarily to look terrified near a ticking clock or supportive in a kitchen with marble countertops, leaving the actual emotional heavy lifting to the background score which constantly swells whenever someone mentions the motherland.

Bollywood movies have always had a complicated relationship with state power, usually treating the uniform as either an infallible moral compass or a corrupt roadblock, but Sooryavanshi goes down a much simpler ideological route where procedure is an annoyance and extrajudicial kneecapping is just good time management. The villains are cardboard cutouts of radicalized youth who spout bad Urdu poetry before blowing themselves up for reasons that are never examined beyond pure, unadulterated malice. There is no attempt at texture or context, which makes the stakes feel entirely weightless even when millions of fake currency notes are supposedly entering the banking sector to fund chaos. Yet the crowd didn't seem to care about political nuance or lack thereof, roaring instead whenever Ranveer Singh showed up as Simmba with an unbuttoned shirt and a gold chain, chewing scenery with the frantic energy of a caffeinated golden retriever. Joju George or even Pankaj Tripathi would have eaten this material alive by finding some greasy humanity in the anti-state figures, but here the antagonists are dispatched with such casual indifference that you forget their names before you even reach the exit turnstiles. The background music by Amar Mohile does not know how to stay quiet for a single frame, pounding percussion into your ears from the opening teaser right through to the patriotic montage that closes the second half.

You can see the sweat behind the production design, especially in the elaborate drone shots of Mumbai traffic that try to trick you into thinking an entire flyover was shut down just for a three-second transitional cut of an unmarked Jeep. The editing by Gautham K. Nair sometimes loses track of spatial continuity during the hand-to-hand combat, jumping between wide angles and tight punch reactions so quickly that you lose track of who is hitting whom in the dusty courtyard brawls. It is loud, unapologetic, and completely indifferent to the quiet observations that make ordinary dramas memorable, choosing instead to rely on the sheer star wattage of its three main leads to carry the runtime across its saggy middle portion. Ranveer's extended cameo adds a burst of chaotic energy that wakes up the audience just as people were starting to check their phones during a long exposition scene about sleeper cells. Hindi movies have chased this kind of shared-universe Avengers formula ever since Rohit Shetty figured out how to park two police jeeps next to each other in Simmba, and while the result is bloated and narratively lazy, it still hits that specific zone of mindless weekend entertainment where you check your brain at the security gate and let the explosions do the heavy lifting.