There is a specific sound a tracksuit makes when someone does a high-kick in a Delhi alleyway and if I'm honest, that noise haunted me for the first twenty minutes of Heropanti. Sabbir Khan directs like he is trying to punch a hole through the back of the projection screen, or perhaps he just wanted to make sure nobody in the cheap seats fell asleep during the dialogue scenes. It is loud. It is brassy. It takes the bones of Ramanaidu's Telugu hit Bommarillu, strips away whatever domestic warmth made that story tick, and drops it into a Haryana-meets-Delhi powder keg where honor killings are discussed over cups of lukewarm tea with the casualness of someone checking the weather forecast. The screenplay is essentially an excuse to move Tiger Shroff from one scaffolding to another while various menacing men with thick mustaches shout threats about local pride and broken engagement rings.

Tiger Shroff arrives with an impossible weight on his shoulders, being the son of Jackie Shroff, and he handles this by simply not acting much and instead folding his body into shapes that defy the laws of physics. His entrance involves a backflip off a moving jeep that feels less like choreography and more like a physical demonstration of spite. He plays Bablu, a guy who smiles too much, wears neon shoes that clash with his denim jackets, and manages to look both completely vacant and entirely lethal within the exact same frame. There is a strange magnetism to his absolute lack of fear, even if his dialogue delivery sounds like he is reading cue cards written in a language he learned five minutes before the cameras rolled. He is doing things in this movie that make you wince for his knee joints, and if he doesn't have the roguish charm of Salman Khan in his early days, he has a manic physical energy that keeps the machine moving even when the plot stalls in the mud.

Kriti Sanon makes her debut as Dimpy, the fiery daughter of a local gangster played by Prakash Raj who is predictably chewing the scenery with great enthusiasm, and she brings a groundedness to the proceedings that frankly the material doesn't deserve. When she cries, her face gets blotchy and real, which is a rare thing in mainstream hindi films where tears usually look like glycerin applied by a makeup artist standing just off-camera. She manages to sell the sudden pivot from terrified runaway to defiant lover even when the script gives her very little to work with beyond screaming at people and wearing remarkably tailored ethnic wear while trapped in a remote farmhouse. The supporting cast features Vikram Singh as the terrifying older brother Raka, who looks like he gargles with gravel every morning and possesses a glare that could curdle milk from twenty paces. Sandeepa Dhar pops up as Renu, and her dubbing is a little out of sync in two separate scenes, which is a small thing that bugged me out of nowhere because once you notice the audio delay on a slap, you cannot unsee it.

Mohan Keenan's cinematography relies heavily on high-contrast lighting that turns every sunset over the mustard fields into a hyper-saturated fever dream, spraying orange and teal across the screen until your eyes ache. It is slick, digital, and completely devoid of texture, looking less like a cinematic world and more like a high-end car commercial that accidentally wandered onto a set designed for a regional gangster drama. The soundtrack by Mustafa Sajid and Vishal Shehlare gives us Whistle Baja, which samples the classic flute tune from his father's film Hero, and they play that specific motif about fourteen times too many over the course of two hours. By the fifth repetition, it stops sounding like a nostalgic nod and starts feeling like a subtle form of psychological torture designed to break your resistance to the narrative.

Underneath the flexing and the shouting, the movie wants to say something about the suffocation of rural tradition and how young people are expected to pay for the sins of their uncles, but it is far too impatient to actually explore those ideas. Sabbir Khan cuts away from any moment of genuine emotional fallout the second someone starts crying, preferring to jump-cut to a wide shot of a tractor or a guy swinging an iron pipe. It treats the khap panchayat culture not as a horrifying reality of modern life but as a colorful backdrop for action set pieces involving flying chairs and shattered glass. We get speeches about love conquering all that sound like they were pulled directly from a greeting card found in a railway station bookstore. The film desperately wants to position itself as a modern romance for the masses, yet it keeps retreating into the safest possible tropes of the action genre whenever things threaten to get complicated.

There is an exhaustion that sets in around the third reel of most modern bollywood movies, and this one hits that wall right when Bablu and Dimpy are running through the sugarcane fields while ten guys with wooden sticks chase them at a brisk jog. You stop caring about who gets the girl and start wondering how they managed to keep Tiger Shroff’s hair so perfectly spiked through three separate mud fights. It is an artifact of a very specific transitional era in commercial cinema, where traditional romantic leads were being phased out in favor of parkour specialists who could also deliver a punch line without blinking. It is loud, it is silly, it forgets its own plot points for twenty minutes at a time, and it never once pretends to be anything other than a vehicle for a very specific set of high-flying kicks.