Varun Sharma has a specific way of dropping his lower jaw that ceased being funny around the middle of the second installment, yet here we are again watching him do it while a CGI honeybee buzzes around his ear in a Delhi alleyway that smells patently of stale mustard oil and budget fog machine. It's a small thing but it bugged me from frame one, this desperate reliance on muscle memory from actors who seem to realize they are trapped in a franchise that has run out of gas long before the opening credits even finish scrolling across the muddy anamorphic frame. You sit there in the dark wondering why anyone thought it was a good idea to drag these characters back out of the trunk where they were politely left gathering dust after the second movie petered out into predictable farce. There is a terrible kind of comfort in how little ambition has gone into the construction of Fukrey 3, a movie that refuses to challenge its audience or its makers in any meaningful way.

Mrigdeep Singh Lamba directs with the visual flair of someone shooting a commercial for a local cement brand on a Tuesday afternoon when the rain is threatening to ruin the lighting setup. The framing is flat, the camera movement mostly consists of lateral tracking shots that serve no narrative purpose other than keeping the actors within the focal plane, and the pacing feels less like a structured comedy and more like an improv workshop that went on forty minutes too long after everyone had already checked their watches. The screenplay by Vipul Vig gives the actors lines that bounce off the walls without ever sticking to anything, relying on endless callback gags to older hindi films like Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. to do the heavy lifting that actual joke-writing ought to be handling. You watch these people run through streets that look suspiciously like a studio backlot in Film City while the background score hits you over the head with obnoxious brass stings every time someone makes a face that is supposed to register as surprise.

Pankaj Tripathi is in it, obviously, because no modern comedy from this corner of the industry seems capable of getting financed without his weary voice anchoring the madness, though even he looks like he is collecting a check to pay off a mortgage in Gurgaon. He still nails the deadpan delivery where he pauses just long enough to let you feel stupid for laughing, but the magic has curdled into routine exhaustion. Richa Chadha bellows her lines with the same fierce intensity she brought to Gangs of Wasseypur, except here she is threatening people over a municipal election involving honey sales and local real estate scams instead of anything resembling actual danger. Pulkit Samrat and Manjot Singh stand around looking bewildered by the plot mechanics they are forced to explain to the camera with glazed expressions that suggest they are trying to remember where they parked their cars.

The cinematography looks like it was graded by someone who discovered the teal-and-orange slider on DaVinci Resolve on a Friday afternoon and decided to apply it to every single outdoor sequence regardless of the time of day or weather conditions. Night scenes are lit with artificial streetlamps that cast a sickly greenish hue over actors' faces, making everyone look slightly jaundiced while they shout dialogue about elections and treasure hunts that make very little internal logic. The sound design is even more punishing, with dialogue tracks that occasionally sound like they were re-recorded in a tiled bathroom three months after the principal photography wrapped up, complete with that weird hollow echo on the consonants. It's not great, not bad, just there, floating in the void of contemporary bollywood movies that prioritize recognizable faces over basic technical competence.

Beneath the lazy political satire about local corporators and groundwater exploitation lies a tired anxiety about urban displacement in the capital, though the movie has nothing interesting to say about gentrification or political corruption beyond making low-effort puns about politicians being bloodsuckers. The whole enterprise treats the working-class Delhi milieu as a permanent costume party where nobody has to pay rent or worry about actual consequences, which is fine for a cartoon but grating when stretched out to two and a half hours of narrative padding. When the characters start scheming to win a local election using bees and honey as political leverage, the script abandons any lingering pretense of social observation and retreats into pure noise.

You leave the cinema feeling less angry than bored, which is perhaps the most damning thing that can happen to a comedy that costs this much money to produce. Hindi films used to be able to coast on charm alone even when the scripts were flimsy paper-thin nonsense, but Fukrey 3 lacks even that basic baseline of human warmth, substituting frantic edits and loud needle drops for actual comedic timing.