The green tint on the Mumbai harbor scenes in Jazbaa looks less like an artistic choice and more like someone left a fluorescent filter taped over the lens for four straight days of exterior work. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every time the camera pulled back to show yet another murky skyline where the sea and the sky blur together into a soup of digital lime. This is Sanjay Gupta’s thing, of course, taking visual cues from glossy American thrillers and Korean revenge dramas and running them through a heavy-handed color grader until every frame feels dipped in mouthwash. Bollywood movies have spent the last decade chasing this hyper-stylized look where shadows are never just shadows and sunlight is strictly forbidden unless it filters through Venetian blinds in a high-rise office. You watch the characters stride through endless parking garages and rain-slicked docklands, and you start to wonder if anyone in this version of the city ever visits a place with normal fluorescent lighting or beige walls. The story itself is adapted from a Korean thriller called Seven Days, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the pacing, which stretches every single interrogation and courtroom shouting match far past the breaking point. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan plays Anuradha Verma, a high-powered criminal defense lawyer who has never lost a case and wears tailored trench coats that must cost more than my entire filing cabinet. Her daughter gets kidnapped by an oily man with a bad haircut and an even worse laugh, and the kidnapper demands she secure the acquittal of a convicted rapist and murderer within four days or the kid gets it. That is the entire motor of the plot, ticking away with all the subtlety of a grandfather clock dropped down a flight of concrete stairs.

Aishwarya is working without a net here, which means her performance swings wildly between stoic, tear-streaked maternal panic and clipped courtroom coldness depending entirely on whether the camera is doing a slow push-in on her eyes. She spends most of the runtime walking purposefully toward buildings while a heavy bassline throbs on the soundtrack, her heels clicking against concrete with an intensity that suggests she is personally auditing the universe. It’s not a bad performance, exactly, but it is one that requires her to maintain an expression of grim determination for nearly two and a half hours without a single moment of genuine levity or casual downtime. When she screams at a corrupt cop or begs a judge for an extension, you can see the effort humming right beneath her cheekbones. She’s matched by Irrfan Khan as Inspector Yohan, a suspended police officer who wears sunglasses at night and speaks entirely in cheeky one-liners that feel like they were written by a smart-aleck teenager trying to impress a film school professor. Irrfan saves half the scenes he is in simply by refusing to match the movie's frantic, over-baked energy. He leans against cars, plays with his collar, and delivers threats with the sleepy cadence of a man waiting for his takeout order to arrive. It is an effortlessly charismatic turn that reminds you why he was always too big for the material he was handed in mainstream Hindi films, operating on an entirely different frequency from everyone else on set. Shabana Azmi shows up for about ten minutes total as the mother of the murdered victim, sitting in a courtroom gallery with a shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders, and she manages to communicate more grief with a single twitch of her jaw than Aishwarya does in entire sequences of running through abandoned warehouses.

The screenplay is where things really start to fray at the edges, collapsing under the weight of its own clumsy moral arithmetic. The central dilemma asks us to sympathize with a mother who is forced to free a genuinely vile man in order to save her own flesh and blood, but the script never really digs into the dirt of that compromise. Instead, it treats the legal system as a playground for dramatic speeches and flashy loopholes where evidence can be fabricated or discarded on a whim depending on what the scene requires. Hindi movies have always had a complicated relationship with the police and the courts, usually treating them as either entirely corrupt punchlines or magical institutions of absolute justice, and Jazbaa tries to have it both ways by making the legal battle a pure game of cat-and-mouse. The dialogue relies heavily on English phrases tossed casually into Hindi sentences, a tic that feels less like how actual lawyers talk and more like a screenwriter trying to sound modern while watching reruns of American legal dramas. Characters deliver exposition while staring out of rain-streaked windows or pacing around sterile conference tables with glass walls. There is an entire subplot involving a corrupt home minister and a hidden flash drive that feels like it was lifted wholesale from an entirely different movie about corporate espionage, dragging the momentum down just when the countdown clock should be ticking loudest. The editing doesn’t help matters, cutting away from dramatic reveals to show slow-motion close-ups of rain droplets hitting a car windshield for reasons that remain entirely mysterious to anyone who enjoys narrative momentum.

What keeps you watching past the hour-and-a-half mark is the sheer stubbornness of the production design and the occasional flash of genuine screen presence from the leads. The soundtrack, composed by a rotating committee of people whose names blur together in the credits, leans hard into booming electronic drums and weeping violins that swell up every time Aishwarya looks at a photograph of her daughter. It’s loud, it’s intrusive, and it refuses to let a single scene breathe without a heavy dose of musical punctuation telling you exactly how to feel about what is happening on screen. Yet there is a strange, hypnotic rhythm to the way Gupta shoots these confrontations, framing his actors against massive concrete pillars and deep blue lighting schemes that make Mumbai look like a Gotham City designed by an accountant with a severe migraine. When Irrfan and Aishwarya share a scene in a roadside tea stall, the camera finally settles down, letting the two of them just talk without forty layers of digital grading getting in the way of their faces. Those quiet stretches are few and far between, buried beneath an avalanche of stylized violence, screeching tires, and plot twists that you can see coming from the very first reel. It’s the kind of cinema that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve, referencing everything from David Fincher to Oldboy without ever quite figuring out how to generate the genuine tension that made those films work. You walk away thinking about the sheer amount of energy expended by everyone involved to pull off something so thoroughly predictable, and wondering why nobody thought to turn down the green filter before hitting print on the final master.