John Abraham blinks too slowly during the interrogation scenes in Shootout at Wadala, and it's a small thing, but it bugged me every time the camera caught it because it feels less like menacing stillness and more like a contact lens shifting around under studio lights. Sanjay Gupta wants to build a monument out of Mumbai's underworld history, though he keeps getting distracted by the sheen of the shoulder holsters and the way cigarette smoke curls past aviator glasses in slow motion, which means the movie spends half its runtime vibrating with frantic, chest-thumping energy and the other half looking like a two-hour print ad for leather jackets. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise rests on a foundation of pure swagger that sometimes collapses under its own weight when people start talking too loudly about destiny and power.

The screenplay adapts material from Hussain Zaidi's book with a blunt-force instrument approach, preferring to slam characters against concrete walls rather than let dialogue do any heavy lifting. Gupta directs like a man who spent his entire youth watching Martin Scorsese edits on fast-forward while listening to heavy metal records, cutting away from dialogue exchanges to insert slow-motion close-ups of boots stepping over puddles or switchblades snapping open with a metallic ping. It is loud. It is exhausting. There's a supporting character, a rival gangster whose name I honestly forgot two minutes after the credits rolled, who is so obviously dubbed by a voice actor standing in a tiny booth with no acoustic padding that every single line he barks sounds like it was recorded inside a tin bucket. This sort of technical slip-up happens constantly in mainstream Hindi films, yet here it feels especially glaring because the picture is so desperately trying to project an aura of slick, oiled-up menace.

As Manya Surve, John Abraham bulks up to the point where his neck muscles look like braided steel cables, carrying the entire narrative on shoulders that appear genuinely incapable of slouching even during moments of profound defeat. He doesn't have the twitchy, unpredictable danger that Vivek Oberoi brought to Company, relying instead on a flat, monochromatic stare that suggests someone turned off all the lights behind his eyes whenever he isn't crushing a man's windpipe. Anil Kapoor anchors the procedural side of the story as ACP Isaque Bagwan, wearing a neat mustache and a permanent expression of weary exhaustion that feels like the only honest human reaction to the swirling vortex of machismo surrounding him. Kangana Ranaut gets sidelined as the tragic girlfriend, a thankless role that requires her to look gorgeous, weep on cue, and occasionally deliver lines about how crime doesn't pay with the sort of forced sincerity that makes you wish she had simply been handed a pistol and told to clear the room herself. Manoj Bajpayee shows up chewing scenery with such joyful abandon that you forget for a few minutes how thin his character actually is, turning every single entrance into an excuse to flash gold teeth and laugh in the face of impending doom.

The visual palette relies on a scorched-earth color grading where every street looks like it was baked in a microwave set to sepia, punctuated by sudden bursts of crimson when someone gets ventilated by a homemade revolver. Cinematographer Sameer Arya keeps the camera orbiting the actors as if gravitational pull depends entirely on how many bad decisions they have made in the last ten minutes, creating a disorienting swirl of motion that occasionally hides the fact that the actual stunt choreography is pretty standard-issue Bollywood punching. Then there's the soundtrack, which pumps aggressive synth lines and screeching electric guitars into scenes of guys walking slowly down dilapidated stairwells, a repetitive musical choice that wears out its welcome about twenty minutes in and refuses to leave the room until the projector finally stops spinning.

Underneath all the gun smoke and oiled biceps, the film tries to argue that a system built on corruption inevitably creates the very monsters it needs to destroy, though it's hard to take the social commentary too seriously when the director is clearly having way more fun filming slow-motion explosions than examining municipal politics. Manya isn't a tragic antihero so much as an excuse to stage massive gunfights in crowded marketplaces, and while the early scenes attempt to trace the humiliations that push him outside the law, the nuance gets chucked out the window the second a submachine gun is pulled from a duffel bag. We are meant to feel the tragedy of a promising young life derailed by academic prejudice and institutional cruelty, but the movie would rather spend its energy lingering on the precise angle of a fedora or the way a drop of sweat traces a path down a stubbly jawline.

The pacing becomes a real problem in the middle stretch where the narrative tries to juggle half a dozen different gang factions without bothering to make any of them distinct beyond their choice of footwear or the specific pattern of scars on their cheeks, leading to a long series of identical ambush scenes that blur together into gray noise. By the time the inevitable showdown arrives on the dusty outskirts of the city, with bullets flying from every conceivable angle and bodies dropping into the dirt with loud thuds, the fatigue has set in so deeply that you just want everyone to find a comfortable chair and take a nap. It's a messy, overcooked slice of pulp cinema that never quite figures out whether it wants to be a gritty historical biography or a Saturday morning cartoon for adults who own leather vests.