Salman Khan wears sunglasses at night during a funeral scene in Antim, which is frankly the kind of commitment to personal branding you just have to admire or else walk out of the theater entirely. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise smells faintly of a star trying to course-correct after a few years of sloppy box office returns by shrinking himself down to a supporting player, though he still manages to hog the camera angles whenever the mood strikes. Mahesh Manjrekar directs this whole mess with a heavy hand, trading the slick gloss you usually get in big-budget hindi films for something much grittier and frankly far more exhausting to sit through.

The plot follows a simple enough trajectory involving land grabbing, poor farmers, and a ruthless young gangster named Rahul who rises through the ranks of the Pune underworld with a machete in his hand and a perpetual scowl on his face. He is played by Aayush Sharma, who spent at least a year in a gym getting absurdly ripped for the part, showing up in nearly every single frame with his shirt half-open and veins popping out of his forearms while he beats people senseless. Aayush Sharma gives it his absolute all, sweating through every single dramatic confrontation and screaming his lungs out during the emotional beats, but his face just doesn't have the mileage required to sell the sort of existential rage the character supposedly feels. It reminds me a bit of Bobby Deol in his early nineties action vehicles where the physical transformation does all the heavy lifting while the performance itself remains entirely one-note.

Opposite him is Salman as Rajveer Singh, a Sikh cop with impeccable posture and zero patience for local extortion rackets, who strolls into a tense situation and starts lecturing everyone about the plight of the working class between slo-mo punch sequences. The character is essentially a walking piece of moral furniture designed to validate the violent impulses of the hero without making him look like a total sociopath, and Salman plays him with the bored, slightly amused detachment of a man who has played this exact cop persona fifteen times already. There is an ongoing issue with the dubbing on some of the minor henchmen where the audio track doesn't quite match the lip movements, and it's a small thing that bugged me every single time it happened during the quiet dialogue scenes.

Mahima Makwana does what she can with a terribly underwritten girlfriend role that exists purely to give Aayush Sharma someone to protect and shout at when things get rough, though her screen time is so minimal you practically forget she is in the narrative for long stretches at a time. The screenplay adapts a Marathi hit called Mulshi Pattern, but in the process of translating that story into a star vehicle for bollywood movies, the filmmakers sanded down all the sharp edges and replaced them with slow-motion walk cycles and heavy-handed voiceover narration that explains the plot points twice just in case you missed them the first time. The cinematography by Ravi V. Chandran tries desperately to inject some moody atmosphere into the proceedings with blue-tinted lighting and sweeping crane shots over dusty slums, yet everything still looks like it was shot on a brightly lit soundstage with fake dirt thrown around for texture.

The soundtrack features a couple of aggressive percussion-heavy tracks that blast through the speakers whenever a fight breaks out, though the mixing is so loud in theaters that you can actually feel your molars vibrating every time the bass drops. We are supposed to care about the socioeconomic realities of rural migration and urban displacement, yet these themes are treated merely as convenient excuses for men in tight clothes to smash each other's faces into car windshields. There is a weird disconnect at the center of the film where it wants to condemn the cycle of violence while simultaneously framing that exact same violence as the only logical response to systemic oppression, leaving you with a confusing ideological mess that doesn't hold up to even five minutes of casual scrutiny.

By shifting the focus away from the typical romantic comedy tropes that often dominate hindi movies, Manjrekar attempts something resembling a social drama about the forgotten victims of rapid modernization, but he ruins it by constantly pausing the narrative to remind us how cool his brother-in-law looks holding a bloody weapon. The pacing drags considerably in the second hour as we watch the exact same plot beat repeat itself three different times with minor variations in costume and location, causing the energy to completely flatline right before the supposed climax. When the final showdown finally arrives in a muddy field with both men stripped to the waist and hacking at each other in the pouring rain, you have already stopped caring who wins or loses because the script has exhausted every ounce of goodwill it built up in the opening twenty minutes.