There is a specific kind of aggressive eye-makeup worn in modern Bollywood thrillers that immediately tells you the character is deeply troubled, usually involving smudged kohl applied with the precision of a toddler finger-painting during an earthquake. Disha Patani wears a lot of it here, marching through gleaming mall atriums and high-end apartments with the exhausted swagger of someone who read the script on the flight to the location and realized her character's entire inner life consists of looking suspicious near large glass windows. Mohit Suri returns to the franchise he spawned a decade ago with a sequel that feels less like a continuation and more like an elaborate exercise in recycling old mood boards, trading the raw, chaotic energy of the original 2014 sleeper hit for a glossy, airless aesthetic that costs ten times as much and means precisely nothing. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels like it was put together by algorithms that only understand human emotion through the medium of slow-motion rain sequences.

The screenplay by Suri and Aseem Arora attempts a convoluted shell game involving two men who both claim to be the same serial killer preying on women who reject men, which sounds like a premise ripped straight from a discarded 90s direct-to-video American potboiler bought on clearance at a gas station. John Abraham plays Bhairav, a cab driver whose towering physical mass makes him about as inconspicuous in a crowd as a derailed freight train, yet somehow the police take forty minutes of screen time to wonder how he sneaks up on anyone. He growls his dialogue as though every single word is causing him physical agony in his lower back, favoring long, brooding silences where he stares at car stereos while rain plasters his hair to his forehead. Arjun Kapoor steps in as Gautam, a wealthy corporate heir whose idea of unhinged grief and madness is wearing slightly unbuttoned silk shirts and shouting his lines with a vein bulging in his temple while standing on balconies.

There is an awkwardness to the pacing that feels entirely unmoored from basic dramatic logic, lurching from manic musical numbers to dreary interrogation scenes without any connective tissue whatsoever. Tara Sutaria plays Aarvi, an aspiring singer whose main narrative function is to stand near amplifiers, look concerned, and occasionally belt out songs that are so aggressively autotuned they sound like a vacuum cleaner trapped inside a tunnel. The editing choices are baffling, particularly a recurring motif where characters pivot away from tense conversations to look at a traffic light or a potted plant for four seconds too long, sucking every ounce of momentum right out of the frame. It's a small thing, but it bugged me the entire time—the sound mixing on the punches sounds like someone dropping a wet sack of flour onto a linoleum kitchen floor, completely disconnected from the actual impact on screen.

Hindi films have always had a complicated relationship with vigilantism, often dressing up raw misogyny as righteous punishment, but this film takes that troubling impulse and coats it in high-gloss neon lighting until it resembles a perfume commercial directed by someone having a mild panic attack. The cinematography by Vikas Sivaraman relies almost exclusively on aggressive blue and orange color grading, turning every hotel room and alleyway into a cyberpunk mood board that belongs in a totally different movie—maybe a mediocre spin-off of Ek Tha Tiger rather than a grimy psychological thriller. Every single surface gleams with artificial moisture, as if someone walked around the entire set with a garden mister right before the director called action, desperate to capture that shiny, slick texture that passes for high production value in modern commercial hindi cinema.

Neither Abraham nor Kapoor manages to find any psychological nuance in characters who are essentially sketched out with a very blunt crayon on the back of a cocktail napkin. Abraham has moments where his sheer physical presence carries a scene simply because it is terrifying to watch a man that large move through a cramped kitchen, but the moment he opens his mouth to deliver dialogue about heartbreak and vengeance, the illusion shatters into dust. Kapoor struggles even more, cycling through three distinct facial expressions—smug, shouting, and sweaty—with the frantic energy of an understudy who only learned he was going on five minutes before curtain. Disha Patani and Tara Sutaria are trapped in roles that require them to be either rescued, romanticized, or ruthlessly discarded, reducing both talented performers to decorative accessories in a masculine pissing contest.

The soundtrack attempts to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success of the original movie's chart-topping album, throwing heavy percussion and soaring vocal tracks at scenes that desperately need silence to generate actual tension. Instead of letting us sit with the dread of a character realizing they are trapped with a monster, the editors slap on a brooding power ballad that flattens out all the emotional variance until every scene feels like a music video playing on a television in an appliance store. You can feel the sweat of the producers trying to manufacture a viral reel moment every ten minutes, pausing the narrative momentum just long enough for someone to pose dramatically against a rain-slicked wall. It makes you long for the messy, unpolished honesty of older bollywood movies that weren't quite so terrified of letting a scene breathe for more than five seconds without a synthetic beat kicking in.

The thematic ambitions of the project are painfully shallow, tossing around vague notions about modern romance, dating app cruelty, and the hidden monsters living next door without ever having the courage to interrogate any of them beyond a surface-level bumper sticker slogan. When the big twist arrives in the final third—and you will see it coming before you even buy your popcorn—it lands with a dull thud rather than a shocking revelation, because the script has spent two hours establishing that logic took a vacation months ago. The villains here aren't scary, the heroes aren't noble, and the romantic tracks feel less like love stories and more like hostage negotiations conducted over bad room service. There is a version of this premise that could have actually dug into the rot beneath urban romance, but this team was far too interested in matching shirts and slow-motion hair flips to bother with anything resembling actual insight.

Watching these characters stalk one another through upscale Mumbai apartments that look like they were furnished by an interior design catalog emptied of all human warmth, you realize the picture has completely abandoned the pulpy, low-budget grit that made its predecessor an unexpected guilty pleasure. It mistakes volume for intensity and mood lighting for atmosphere, leaving the audience stranded in a narrative desert where every oasis turns out to be a cardboard cutout painted by someone who has never met a real person. By the time the final confrontation wraps up on a rooftop with far too much wind machine activity, you are just grateful for the impending darkness of the theater lights coming back up.