Adah Sharma makes a funny face right near the beginning of Commando-2 that I still cannot quite figure out whether to blame on the director or her acting coach, a strange little twitch of the upper lip that suggests she just bit into something sour while trying to look like a hardened cyber-crime expert flown in straight from London. If I'm honest, it sets a very specific tone for the next two hours, which stumble around between grim-faced geopolitical thriller nonsense and the sort of neon-lit absurdity you usually get when somebody watches The Transporter once too often and decides they can do it cheaper. Hindi films have a long, slightly messy history of trying to import Western action tropes without ever quite figuring out how to build the pipes to carry them, resulting in movies that look sleek on the surface while leaking oil out of every possible joint. Deven Bhojani, stepping behind the camera after years of playing the endearing neighbour on television comedies, directs the whole thing like a man who was given a playbook of 1990s Hollywood action clichés and told to shoot them on a budget that barely covered the stunt coordinator's insurance. There is a relentless, exhausting urgency to the editing that makes every single conversation feel like it is about to erupt into a spinning kick, even when the characters are just standing around in a sterile white command room discussing international banking laws. The screenplay by Ritesh Shah tries desperately to knit together black money, offshore accounts, and patriotic fervor into a single coherent narrative arc, but it constantly gets distracted by its own shiny objects, abandoning plot logic for five minutes at a time just so Vidyut Jamwal can dismantle a group of generic henchmen in a cramped kitchen or a dimly lit parking garage.

Vidyut Jamwal remains a fascinating, deeply peculiar screen presence in modern Hindi cinema, possessing a physique that looks carved out of dense teak wood combined with a vocal delivery that suggests he is constantly reading cue cards pasted just behind the camera lens. He doesn't act so much as he waits patiently between fight sequences, his face locked into an expression of mild, Zen-like boredom that only vanishes the second someone throws a punch at him. When the fighting starts, though, the movie temporarily remembers why it exists, transforming Jamwal into a human blender of elbows, knees, and flying kicks that defy gravity and occasionally basic human anatomy. You can see the echoes of Tony Jaa and Scott Adkins in the way his limbs snap out with terrifying speed, but Jamwal lacks the greasy charisma of a proper B-movie villain or the floppy-haired charm of a traditional leading man, leaving him in this weird netherworld where he is neither a relatable hero nor a terrifying force of nature. Around him, the supporting cast behaves as though they are participating in three entirely different movies shot on the same lot. Esha Gupta swans through her scenes in an endless parade of glamorous evening gowns and impossibly high heels, playing a ruthless international fundraiser with the weary detachment of someone waiting for her wire transfer to clear so she can fly back to Milan. She is supposed to be the icy mastermind pulling the strings from behind a veil of corporate respectability, yet she spends half her screen time staring blankly at computer monitors that display flashing red graphics with the word FRAUD written in large capital letters. Adah Sharma gets the bulk of the comic relief and a romantic subplot that exists mostly to give Jamwal someone to rescue from men with automatic weapons, and she plays it with a screechy, breathless intensity that grates on the nerves long before the intermission hits. It's a small thing, but the sound design on her voice lines is terribly uneven, jumping up in volume every time she raises her pitch, which happens roughly every thirty seconds.

The visual language of the picture is defined largely by a stubborn refusal to turn off the color grading suite's blue and teal filters, turning every location from Malaysia to rural Punjab into a cold, clinical expanse of grey concrete and neon glare. Cinematographer Chirantan Das seems obsessed with shooting through things—blurry car windows, dangling chains, plastic foliage, and occasionally just the sweaty shoulder of a stunt double—in a clumsy attempt to manufacture depth where the frame is mostly just empty space. The soundtrack by Mannan Shaah and Prasad Sashte relies heavily on pounding electronic basslines and generic chanting that tries to sound like Zimmer's work on The Dark Knight, thumping away in the background even during quiet moments when characters are just looking at a passport or examining a blurry photograph. Action choreography is, naturally, the entire point of the exercise, and on that front, the film delivers a mixed bag of genuinely inventive hand-to-hand combat and embarrassingly obvious wirework where you can spot the support harnesses clear as day in wide shots. A sequence set in an abandoned factory involves Jamwal fighting off half a dozen guys using only a wooden mop handle, and for about ninety seconds it achieves that rare, balletic grace where the camera pulls back just enough to let you appreciate the physical geometry of the beatdown without twenty rapid-fire cuts per second ruining the geography of the room. Then someone throws a smoke grenade, the editing goes haywire, and we are back to murky close-ups of boots connecting with ribs.

Themes of corruption, black money, and the moral ambiguity of extrajudicial justice run through the script like a dirty thread, though the film is far too cowardly to actually engage with any of them beyond using them as convenient excuses for more violence. Jamwal's character, Captain Karanvir Singh, operates under the comforting delusion that stealing thousands of crores from corrupt politicians and bringing them back to India in a single duffel bag is an effective solution to systemic economic inequality, a worldview so childishly simplistic that it would make a comic book writer blush. The politics of the piece are aggressively nationalistic in that hollow, boardroom-tested way that has become standard issue for contemporary Bollywood movies, where patriotism is expressed mostly through slow-motion walks toward fluttering flags and dialogue about cleaning up the motherland. Nobody in the writer's room appears to have spent five minutes thinking about how international banking actually works, which leads to hilarious scenes where millions of dollars are transferred between offshore accounts with the press of a single glowing red button on a generic laptop. It treats complex geopolitical theft like an arcade game where you just need to press the right combination of buttons before the timer runs out. When the bad guys start monologuing about economic stability and national security, you can practically hear the collective sigh of the audience waiting for the next round of roundhouse kicks to begin, because nobody involved in the production actually gives a damn about the fiscal policy they are shouting about.

By the time the narrative stumbles toward its bloated, excessively loud conclusion, the sheer accumulation of logical holes and wooden line readings has worn down even the most forgiving viewer's patience. There is no grand thematic synthesis here, no clever reversal of expectations, and certainly no artistic triumph to be salvaged from the wreckage of the script's final act. It simply stops because the running time has crossed the two-hour mark and the budget presumably ran out of money for more explosions in Malaysia. Jamwal gets to deliver one final stilted speech about duty and honor while staring directly into the camera lens with that same blank, unblinking glare that started the whole mess. Esha Gupta is last seen boarding a private jet that looks suspiciously like a local studio set with a green screen backdrop of clouds, and Adah Sharma makes one more weird face just to remind us she was there. It is a loud, forgettable machine designed to kill two hours on a rainy afternoon without demanding anything from your brain, and on that very limited, thoroughly mediocre level, it somehow manages to cross the finish line.