Ileana D'Cruz holds a very specific kind of cigarette case in Baadshaho that looks too modern for nineteen seventy-five, and every time she clicks it open during a tense conversation in a dusty Rajasthani guest house, my brain just completely stalls out on the prop master's oversight. Milan Luthria has always been a director who cares much more about the sheen of a leather jacket under a harsh amber filter than whether the historical timeline of the Emergency aligns with the logistics of armored trucks carrying gold bullion across state lines. It is a messy picture from the very first frame, refusing to settle into the slick rhythm you expect from mainstream Hindi films that try to marry period detail with heist-movie mechanics. The screenplay, credited to Rajat Arora, lurches from dialogue scenes that sound like recycled WhatsApp forwards to extended stretches of desert highway driving where nobody says a word while an analog synthesizer wails on the soundtrack. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels bolted together from spare parts left over from Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, just dragged out into the blazing sun and left to bake until the paint started peeling off the fenders.

Ajay Devgn plays Bhawani with his usual squint, that familiar posture of a man who looks perpetually annoyed that he has to carry an entire feature film almost entirely on the strength of his cheekbones and a weathered slouch. He wears aviators inside dimly lit rooms and throws people against sandstone walls with a dull thud that lacks any real cinematic crunch. He has done this exact character in dozens of other projects over the past twenty years, squinting against the same dust storms, delivering the same lines about loyalty and betrayal with a throat-clearing growl that used to be intimidating but now just registers as efficient. Emraan Hashmi shows up as Dalia, wearing colorful scarves and grinning through scenes that require him to jump out of moving jeeps or flirt with Vidyut Jammwals square-jawed, impossibly humorless military intelligence officer. Hashmi tries to inject some actual pulse into the proceedings, but the editing keeps cutting away from his comic timing just as he finds a groove, rushing him into the next explosion or the next slow-motion walk away from a burning vehicle. Vidyut Jammwal stands around looking like an Armani ad dropped into the middle of a dusty local western, his biceps doing most of the heavy lifting while his line delivery remains entirely flat and unbothered by the chaos around him.

There is a specific supporting actor in the convoy sequence whose voice has clearly been dubbed by a completely different human being in a small Mumbai studio, and the acoustic mismatch every time he opens his mouth during a life-or-death standoff is enough to break whatever spell the art department worked so hard to cast over the location. The cinematography by Sunil Patel leans hard into scorched yellows and deep, muddy browns, making everything look like it was dipped in weak tea before being transferred to the digital intermediate suite. When the gold finally starts moving across the dunes, the camera swoops and dives with the desperation of a mosquito looking for a vein, cutting so fast between wide shots of trucks and close-ups of gear shifts that you lose all sense of geography or spatial tension. It is supposed to feel like a gritty throwback to vintage masala cinema, but it lacks the organic grain and patient framing that made those older pictures actually breathe. Instead, you get a hyper-active, overly polished digital sheen that flattens out the texture of the desert, turning real sand into something that looks suspiciously like CGI dust kicked up by lazy grips.

Sanjoy Kumars editing choices often leave reaction shots lingering a full two seconds longer than they should, letting actors stare blankly into the middle distance while the musical score tries desperately to manufacture an emotional stakes that the preceding scene never actually earned. The soundtrack features a few recycled tracks and some new numbers that hit the brakes on the narrative just as the heist is getting somewhere interesting, hauling the characters off to a brightly lit courtyard for a choreographed dance number that nobody asked for and nobody seems particularly invested in performing. Esha Gupta drifts through these musical interludes and dramatic scenes with the exact same expression of mild boredom, her character existing solely to fill out period-appropriate costumes and occasionally shoot a villain with a revolver that has an infinite magazine. The underlying political backdrop of nineteen seventy-five is treated purely as aesthetic window dressing, a convenient excuse for men in safari suits to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and talk darkly about state power while plotting against an unnamed Prime Minister who never appears on screen. This isn't the sort of political thriller that has anything sharp to say about corruption or authoritarianism, and treating it as a critique of anything real would be giving the scriptwriters way more credit than their lazy genre-pasting deserves.

By the time the third-act double-crosses start piling up in an abandoned fort, the plotting becomes so convoluted that even the actors look like they are just guessing which camera to face when the director yells action. Bollywood movies have always loved a good treasure hunt, but this particular exercise forgets that half the fun of a caper is watching smart people outsmart other smart people through clever planning rather than just watching Ajay Devgn punch his way through an endless supply of nameless henchmen who politely wait their turn to be thrown off a rampart. It occupies that strange middle ground of contemporary Hindi cinema that refuses to be delightfully campy yet lacks the discipline to be a straight-faced genre piece, leaving audiences stranded in a kind of cinematic purgatory where things happen simply because the budget required another car crash. You can see the seams of the production in almost every scene, from the mismatched continuity of the dust on the characters' faces to the way the lighting shifts from harsh midday sun to studio soft-box in the span of a single conversation shot-reverse-shot sequence. It is not an unwatchable disaster, but it is deeply, aggressively ordinary in a way that makes you wonder why anyone bothered to haul those heavy cameras out into the Rajasthan heat in the first place.