The sound design during the interrogation scenes in IB71 features a strange, high-pitched metallic whine that feels less like a deliberate atmospheric choice and more like someone left a monitor turned up in the audio sweetening bay, which is the sort of small, nagging distraction that pulls you out of a movie before the premise even has time to settle its feet. We have seen this specific flavor of patriotic spy thriller in Bollywood before, usually trotted out around national holidays with a predictable slate of flag-waving rhetoric and a lot of actors looking very serious while staring at maps, but Sankalp Reddy’s picture tries something slightly stranger by focusing almost entirely on logistics rather than fisticuffs. The story is built around a fabricated hijacking in 1971 designed to close Pakistani airspace to Indian flights ahead of the war, an actual bit of intelligence history that sounds frankly absurd on paper and requires a very particular kind of straight-faced commitment from its cast to keep from tipping over into farce. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise rests on a premise so convoluted that you spend the first thirty minutes trying to draw a flowchart on a napkin just to figure out who is double-crossing whom, which might be accurate to the bureaucratic reality of the Intelligence Bureau back then but makes for a slightly bumpy cinematic ride.

Reddy directs with a cold, functional eye that owes more to the procedural grit of something like The Bureau than it does to the glossy, high-flying aesthetics we usually associate with contemporary Hindi films, refusing to linger on patriotic grandstanding even when the script practically begs for a speech about Mother India. He lets scenes play out in cramped, poorly lit rooms where the paint is peeling off the walls, and the camera movements are tight and occasionally clumsy, as if the operators are rushing to clear the frame before the actual authorities show up. The screenplay, which Reddy co-wrote, has a nasty habit of dumping exposition through rapid-fire dialogue delivered by men in badly tailored suits standing around water coolers, but it also contains moments of genuine tension where silence does the heavy lifting. There are stretches where nobody speaks for several minutes, just people looking at wristwatches and biting their fingernails while airplanes sit on tarmacs, and these stretches are easily the best things in the movie because they abandon the need for constant plot momentum and just let the claustrophobia breathe. Still, the narrative mechanics occasionally stutter, particularly when the film has to explain how a bunch of low-level agents are supposed to outsmart an entire nation’s military apparatus using little more than a stolen plane and a lot of nervous sweating, requiring leaps in logic that even the most forgiving viewer might struggle to make without pulling a muscle.

Vidyut Jammwal plays Dev Jammwal, an intelligence officer whose primary emotional expression is a slight tightening of the jaw and a distant stare that suggests he is constantly calculating the distance to the nearest exit, which works surprisingly well for a character who spends most of the runtime hiding in plain sight. Jammwal has made a career out of tossing people across rooms in high-octane action vehicles like Khuda Haafiz, so watching him tone down the physical pyrotechnics in favor of muted calculation feels like a deliberate pivot, even if his dialogue delivery remains somewhat stiff when he has to sound concerned about national security. He shares screen time with a sprawling supporting ensemble, including Dalip Tahil playing the kind of crusty, weary superior officer who has smoked one too many cigarettes and seen one too many plans go sideways, bringing a lived-in exhaustion to every scene he occupies. Vishal Jethwa pops up as a volatile young operative whose emotional stability is questionable at best, and while his performance is suitably intense, the film gives him a couple of crying scenes that are dubbed so poorly you can hear the acoustic shift in the room the moment he opens his mouth. Niharica Raizada drifts through the background with very little to do, serving mostly as a quiet presence in rooms full of shouting men who treat her professional contributions as an afterthought, an unfortunate trope that standard spy dramas in this industry rely on with depressing regularity.

The cinematography by Gnana Shekar V.S. leans heavily into a desaturated palette of slate greys and muddy browns, making 1971 Kashmir and Pakistan look like they were filmed through a dirty window on a rainy Tuesday, which effectively strips away any romantic notions about covert operations. There is no sweeping orchestral score telling you when to feel nervous; instead, the soundtrack relies on low, vibrating synth drones and sudden bursts of percussion that mimic a racing heartbeat, though the composer leans on one particular four-note motif so often that you start anticipating it five seconds before it drops. The editing cuts between the control room and the hijacked aircraft with a briskness that prevents you from lingering on the narrative holes, though it occasionally introduces continuity errors where actors are holding cigarettes in one shot and empty hands in the next, minor flubs that suggest a tighter schedule than the production could comfortably handle. It is a world of rotary phones, carbon paper, and heavy wool coats, and the art department deserves credit for keeping the period details grounded without turning the frame into a museum exhibit where every prop is screaming for your attention.

Thematic ambitions here are surprisingly modest for a genre that usually trips over itself trying to deliver profound statements about geopolitics, focusing instead on the messy, morally grey compromises required to keep a nation functioning when the politicians are screaming at each other in parliament. The characters do not talk about patriotism as a lofty ideal; they talk about it as a job they happen to be stuck doing, a set of administrative tasks that involve forging documents, lying to their families, and occasionally watching innocent people get chewed up by machinery they never asked to operate. This cynicism saves the film from becoming an insufferable propaganda piece, allowing it to acknowledge that the heroes of intelligence work are frequently just bureaucrats with guns who make terrible mistakes that get buried under classified stamps. Hindi movies have long had a complicated relationship with state power, frequently alternating between blind reverence and cynical suspicion, and IB71 sits comfortably in the middle, unsure whether it wants to celebrate these men as geniuses or pity them as tools of a cold system. The closing sequences attempt to tie up the various geopolitical threads with a hurried voiceover that explains what happened to everyone involved, reducing complex historical maneuvering to a few bullet points on a black screen, which feels cheap after two hours of painstaking procedural detail.

You leave the theater wondering why the filmmakers felt the need to frame this bizarre piece of Cold War-adjacent trickery as a standard-issue thriller when the most interesting parts were the logistics of moving people across borders with fake passports and stolen uniforms. It is an uneven piece of work that gets bogged down by its own convoluted plotting and occasional bursts of sluggish pacing, yet it retains a certain stubborn integrity because it refuses to rely on cheap emotional manipulation to earn its dramatic beats. Jammwal proves he can anchor a picture with his presence alone, even if the script leaves him stranded in rooms where nobody is saying anything interesting, and Reddy shows a steady hand when the logistics threaten to collapse under their own weight. Not great, not bad, just there, taking up space in your memory for a few days before fading into the background noise of mediocre streaming content, which is probably the fate of most middle-tier cinema produced in this country right now.