Suniel Shetty wears a brown leather jacket in this film that looks like it cost thirty bucks at a roadside stall in Bandra and honestly I cannot stop thinking about it. It sits heavily on his shoulders, bunching awkwardly around the neck every time he turns to fire a pistol or growl a threat about coal mafia politics. This is not high art. It is a grinding, sweaty, low-budget chunk of commercial cinema that tries to stare down the barrel of resource exploitation in Jharkhand and mostly ends up squinting through a cloud of cheap fog machine smoke.

Ashu Trikha directs with the blunt force trauma of a carpenter building a crate using only a brick. He doesn't trust the audience to pick up on subtext, so characters literally stand in front of massive open-pit mines and explain capitalism to each other while bulldozers rumble menacingly in the background. The screenplay is a mess of half-finished motivations and sudden violence. People shoot first and develop character traits later. Vinod Khanna plays a patriarchal coal kingpin named Sarju Singh, moving through his scenes with the weary authority of a man who knows the check cleared days ago but still has to stand under these brutal lights until the sun goes down.

Vinod Khanna's performance has a strange, decaying gravity to it. He doesn't yell much, choosing instead to narrow his eyes and let younger actors scream themselves hoarse around him while he simply occupies the center of the frame like an ancient tree rotting from the inside out. Then there is Vipinno, playing the sort of hotheaded younger rival who exists purely to smash tea glasses against walls and look furious during establishing shots. He acts with his entire face, sometimes aggressively so, chewing up the dialogue with a manic energy that makes you wish the editor had cut away about three seconds earlier than he did. It is a loud, messy movie that occasionally remembers it needs a plot and then just has someone kidnap a local politician to get the wheels turning again.

Suniel Shetty enters around the halfway mark as Nandan Kumar, an honest bureaucrat who thinks paperwork can stop bullets. He plays this role with a singular, unblinking intensity that reminds me of Sanjay Dutt in Plan, where every single line delivery feels like it is being dragged out of the actor's boots through sheer stubbornness. He walks through the dusty quarry sets as if he's personally offended by the lack of proper zoning laws. When he and Khanna share screen space, the film actually generates a bit of friction, two different eras of Hindi cinema staring each other down across a messy mahogany desk covered in ledger books.

The cinematography relies heavily on high-contrast lighting that turns every sunset into an orange bruise over the hills, which gets exhausting after the third time it happens in twenty minutes. There's a supporting actor playing a corrupt union leader who is so blatantly dubbed in a studio somewhere in Mumbai that his mouth movements and the audio track belong to two different zip codes. It is a small thing, sure, but it pulls you right out of the grit. The soundtrack by an assortment of forgettable composers thumps away in the background with generic percussion whenever a fistfight breaks out, adding very little to the mood except noise.

Bollywood movies have long loved the feudal lord trope, the powerful patriarch ruling over a desolate landscape of exploited workers and weeping mothers. This project doesn't subvert that trope so much as it rolls around in the mud of it. The female characters, played by Roopali Krishnarao and Purva Parag, spend most of their screen time weeping behind pillars or delivering warnings about impending bloodshed that the men ignore completely. They are narrative furniture moved around to motivate the male lead's vengeance cycle. You've seen this exact plot structure in half a dozen other regional crime dramas, but without the budget to make the explosions look like anything more than localized firework accidents.

There's a scene near the end where Vinod Khanna gives a long monologue about the ownership of the earth while standing in front of a burning coal pile that goes on for several minutes too long. The editor should have trimmed it right down, but they let it breathe, letting the old star chew on the scenery until there was nothing left but ash. You sit there in the dark watching these people yell about unions and cartels, wondering how much actual coal was mined in Jharkhand versus how much of this was shot on a dusty backlot outside Goregaon with some rented tractors and a few bags of black powder.

It stays on your mind for a bit afterward, mostly because of how aggressively unpretentious its shlockiness is. It isn't trying to win awards at festivals in Europe or start conversations about green energy policies. It wants to show men in leather jackets shooting each other over mineral rights in the dirt. It delivers that specific, low-grade satisfaction with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of noise.