The sound design during the conference room shouting matches in Rush has this weird habit of boosting the room tone right when nobody is talking, which makes every breath sound like someone dragged a microphone across a wool rug. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me for the entire first half-hour because you are trying to listen to the dialogue and instead you just hear fabric rustling against static. We are supposed to be inside the high-pressure boiler room of a fictional 24-hour news network where every second counts toward the TRP ratings, but the Foley work keeps reminding you that you are sitting in a soundstage somewhere on the outskirts of Mumbai listening to actors swallow between lines. Bollywood movies have gotten infinitely cleaner over the last decade, yet here we are stuck with audio mixing that sounds like an early-aughts direct-to-video thriller bought off a petrol station shelf.

Director Shmushy Mukherjee—credited as Shmushy—and whoever was actually behind the monitor on the days he didn't show up never quite figured out how to shoot a conversation without panning across a bank of glowing computer monitors to prove they spent money on LED strips. The screenplay by Sanjay Masoom lurches from scene to scene like a shopping cart with two flat casters, hauling Emraan Hashmi’s investigative journalist character Sam Grover through one impossible corporate setup after another. Sam is meant to be a sharp-elbowed shark of the airwaves, but Hashmi plays him with this permanent look of mild exhaustion, as if he stayed up late watching reruns and regrets every career choice that led him to a desk with a microphone. There is zero chemistry between him and Sagarika Ghatge, who plays his estranged wife, and when they share screen time the dialogue drops with a dull thud onto the carpet.

Neha Dhupia fares a bit better simply by leaning into the camp value of playing a ruthless media mogul named Maria Roy who wears trench coats indoors and shouts Latin phrases at interns. If I'm honest, Dhupia looks like she is having a much better time than anyone else on set, chewing up the scenery with a scenery-shredding glee that recalls Urmila Matondkar in Pyar Tune Kya Kiya, minus the actual menace. She glares at the camera, she slams glass coffee mugs down on teak desks, and she delivers lines about media ethics with the conviction of a soap opera villain reading from a cereal box. Aditya Pancholi shows up too, glowering from behind polarized sunglasses in broad daylight, contributing very little beyond an aura of mild irritation.

The visual palette is stuck in that late-2000s digital sheen where everything looks slightly desaturated except for neon signs and lipstick, rendering the South African locations—used here to stand in for various international media hubs—into generic stretches of concrete and glass that could be any business park in Noida. Dune Kossatz and Genna Cloud and Dunay Nortje drift through the background of these scenes as foreign corporate thugs and random party guests, speaking English with the strained, careful articulation of people who were handed their pages five minutes before the cameras rolled. The soundtrack hits you over the head with generic electronica every time Sam walks down a corridor with purpose, which is often, because nobody in this film ever just stands still when they can stride purposefully toward a green-screen window.

What makes the whole enterprise frustrating isn't just the cheapness of the production or the lazy plotting that resolves kidnapping threats with a single phone call, but the way hindi films keep trying to mimic American cable dramas without understanding that those shows actually had writers' rooms that cared about cause and effect. Sam gets blackmailed, he agrees to do illegal things for the syndicate, he feels bad about it for roughly twenty seconds of screen time, and then he goes right back to reading teleprompters with that same tired squint. Hindi movies have always relied on star charisma to paper over narrative gaps, but Hashmi’s sleepy-eyed routine works best when he is playing a low-level hustler in a dark alley, not an anchor holding down the evening news.

There is an awkward sequence near the end involving a flash drive, a crowded hotel lobby, and four separate security guards who forget how to run, and it just sits there on screen taking up minutes of your life that you will never get back. The editing cuts between close-ups of blinking cursor lights and sweat beading on foreheads with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, begging you to feel the tension that the actors clearly aren't feeling. By the time the credits roll over a generic remix of the main theme, you aren't angry at the waste of potential because there wasn't any potential to begin with, just a collection of scenes shot in random rooms held together by hope and editing software.