Chunkey Pandey wearing those round metallic sunglasses indoors always bothered me just a tiny bit. Tezaab opens with a kind of restless energy that never quite settles down for the next three hours, jumping between gritty street corners and over-lit melodramatic interiors without giving your eyes a second to adjust. If I'm honest, N. Chandra wasn't interested in subtlety when he sat in the director's chair for this one, preferring instead to shove every single emotion right up against the lens until it blurred. The screenplay borrows heavily from prior action hits of the decade like Sholay while adding a frantic, lower-middle-class desperation that belonged entirely to the late eighties. You can feel the sweat dripping off the celluloid during the dialogue heavy confrontation scenes where characters scream at each other across impossibly wide rooms.

Anil Kapoor plays Munna with a wire-thin intensity that makes you wonder if he actually slept during the entire shoot. He tears through action sequences and emotional breakdowns with the exact same manic look in his eyes, barking his lines with a hoarse urgency that eventually wears you down if you aren't paying attention. Then you have Madhuri Dixit entering the frame as Mohini, and the whole movie suddenly shifts on its axis the second she starts dancing. Her performance in the first half is mostly reactive, standing behind protective older men while looking terrified, but her screen presence was already undeniable enough to anchor the entire enterprise. It is a messy, sprawling thing, this movie, bulging with too many subplots and too many comic relief bits involving Anupam Kher chewing scenery with fake teeth and even faking a stammer that got old about ten minutes after he walked on screen.

Laxmikant-Pyarelal delivered a massive commercial score here, but hearing the exact same instrumental cue every time Munna gets punched by a corrupt cop starts wearing thin by the midpoint. The cinematography by Baba Azmi refuses to sit still, panning across dimly lit chawls with a harsh documentary lighting style that makes everything look a little dirty and lived-in. Hindi movies of this vintage often relied on studio sets that looked like plywood, but Chandra dragged his crew out into real Bombay alleyways and railway platforms, capturing the grime and the actual crowds of a city bursting at the seams. Johnny Lever shows up for about five minutes to do some frantic impressions, and while it adds nothing to the plot, it gives you a quick breather from the relentless misery of the main character's downward spiral.

The entire narrative hinges on systemic corruption and the failure of the legal system to protect the innocent, which was standard boilerplate for commercial Indian cinema at the time. Yet there is a specific kind of rage pulsing underneath the father-son dynamics here that feels slightly more personal than your average revenge thriller from that era. When Suresh Oberoi appears as the upright father destroyed by local thugs, the tragedy feels heavy and earned, even if the staging relies on every single trope in the book. Characters constantly make terrible decisions just to keep the plot moving into the next fight sequence, and you will find yourself yelling at the screen because Munna refuses to walk away when he clearly has the chance. That stubborn self-destructiveness is what separates him from the polished heroes of other contemporary Bollywood productions.

By the time the chaotic courtroom climax arrives, complete with shouted monologues and desperate gunplay, the film has exhausted every narrative trick it started with. The editing choices get downright choppy in the final reel, cutting away from reaction shots half a second too soon as if the projectionist was rushing to swap the reels. You leave the theater or turn off the screen thinking less about the social message and more about how hard Kapoor was breathing during that final sprint through the muddy courtyards. It is rough around the edges and structurally bloated in a way that modern commercial Hindi cinema has largely forgotten how to do, for better and for worse.