That one leather jacket Aditya Pancholi wears in the second half has a collar that looks perpetually damp, and if I'm honest, it distracted me for at least twenty minutes of screen time while the plot was busy falling apart around him. Sanjay Dutt enters the frame wearing shades indoors, carrying the kind of heavy, slow-burn exhaustion that usually takes twenty years of bad habits to manufacture naturally, which works for a character whose primary job description is standing near abandoned warehouses looking betrayed by everyone he has ever shared a cup of chai with. Director Sanjay Gupta was clearly studying the neon-soaked framing of John Woo via badly dubbed VHS tapes floating around Bombay editing rooms, trying to replicate that specific brand of bullet-riddled brotherhood without always possessing the budget or the editorial patience to make the geography of a shoot-out make sense. You get these sprawling, chaotic confrontations in dry docks and unfinished housing colonies where extras fall over long before the bullet hits them, and yet there is an undeniable kinetic rush to the way the camera tracks a slow-motion sprint across a gravel lot. The screenplay borrows heavily from Deewaar minus the moral architecture, preferring instead to throw its characters into a meat-grinder of revenge plots and misplaced familial loyalty until everybody is sweating through their designer polyester and screaming at each other over the roar of cargo ships. It is loud, messy, and structurally unsound, operating on the kind of fever-pitch logic where nobody ever walks to a destination when they can slide across the bonnet of an Ambassador instead.

Sanjay Dutt plays Baba with a singular, bruised intensity that makes you forget how many times you have seen this exact narrative arc play out across a dozen other mid-nineties Hindi films where the anti-hero has a heart of pure gold buried beneath a crust of cigarette smoke and leather. He doesn't stretch himself here, but he doesn't need to because the camera loves the way the shadows fall across his cheekbones when he is brooding in the back of a stolen jeep. Opposite him, Atul Agnihotri is tasked with playing the naive younger brother who gets sucked into the syndicate because he needs money for a noble reason involving a sister's wedding or some such standard melodrama, and he plays it with a wide-eyed sincerity that occasionally borders on vacant. Karishma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon show up whenever the narrative desperately requires someone to look worried in a brightly colored chiffon saree against a backdrop of potted palms, and while neither actress gets much to sink her teeth into beyond waiting by a telephone, they bring an effortless star wattage that temporarily blinds you to the absurdity of the dialogue they are forced to deliver. Ajit chews the scenery with magnificent, grandfatherly menace as the primary villain, sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk that looks entirely out of place in a hideout made of corrugated tin, murmuring threats that carry the weight of thirty years of Bollywood movies about betrayed syndicates and gold smuggling.

There's a recurring saxophone cue that drops in every time Dutt looks out a rainy window, and after the fourth or fifth repetition, it starts to feel less like a musical choice and more like a persistent mosquito buzzing near your ear in the dark. The cinematography by Sameer Arya leans heavily into hard amber filters and aggressive lens flares, turning every dust-choked industrial estate into an expressionist playground where the lighting is always dramatic even if the source makes zero logical sense. Characters step out of total darkness into pools of harsh white light just to deliver a line about blood being thicker than water, and you just have to surrender to the artifice because fighting it takes too much energy. The soundtrack by Nadeem-Shravan pushes through the speakers with a relentless, synthesized percussion section that threatens to rattle the popcorn out of your lap during the romantic interludes, which are intercut with gangsters plotting drive-by shootings with alarming casualness. Editing choices frequently defy standard continuity, cutting away from a conversation to a close-up of a spinning car tire or a dripping tap for no discernible reason other than the editor probably fell asleep at the splicing machine and left whatever frame was handy rolling on the workprint.

Loyalty remains the blunt instrument this entire narrative uses to bludgeon its audience, suggesting that brotherhood is both a sacred shield against a hostile world and a trap you can never claw your way out of once the blood starts flowing. Nobody in this universe escapes their past, least of all the ones who try to go straight by opening a small garage or running a modest roadside tea stall, because the underworld always sends a former associate with a nickel-plated revolver to remind them of old debts. It is a cynical worldview wrapped up in glossy packaging, where familial bonds are constantly weaponized by older men who view kids as disposable assets in a turf war that has been grinding on since before the protagonists were old enough to shave. You can see the blueprint for much of the grittier modern cinema that would eventually crawl out of the Hindi film industry years later, though those later directors usually remembered to write an ending that didn't rely on twenty minutes of continuous slow-motion carnage in a muddy gravel quarry.

It ultimately lands somewhere between a guilty pleasure and a chore, dragging its feet through endless scenes of men yelling at each other in cavernous industrial spaces before finally giving up and letting the stunt doubles handle the heavy lifting. The pacing completely collapses in the third act when the plot has to pause for a forty-minute wedding sequence that halts all momentum just so the supporting cast can dance badly while wearing clothes that cost more than the entire production budget of a parallel-cinema classic from the same decade. If you happen to be operating on the right wavelength of nostalgia and low expectations, the sheer audacity of its bad taste might just carry you across the finish line without inducing a migraine. Otherwise, you'll find yourself staring at the texture of that damp leather collar on Aditya Pancholi, wondering why nobody on set thought to hand him a towel.