There is a specific sound a prop makes when it hits a cheap soundstage wall, a dull hollow thud that usually tells you the grip department is tired and the director has lost interest in covering his angles. A Flying Jatt makes that exact noise about twenty minutes in, right before Tiger Shroff gets thrown into a stack of empty cardboard boxes that collapse with all the dramatic weight of wet tissue paper. If I'm honest, nobody goes into a superhero movie starring a guy whose primary superpower is a mild fear of heights expecting Christopher Nolan, but Remo D'Souza directs action with the frantic, scattershot energy of someone trying to clear his browser history before his mom walks in. The camera swoops and dives for no discernible reason, spinning around actors who are clearly just hanging from harnesses in a green room with three fans blowing dust into their eyes. Hindi films have wrestled with the mechanics of wire-work for decades now, often treating gravity as a polite suggestion rather than a physical law, but this picture takes that disregard and stretches it until the CGI characters look less like humans and more like badly rendered polygons from a discontinued PlayStation 2 game. You can almost see the cursor clicking on the drop-down menu in After Effects.

Tiger Shroff plays Aman, a martial arts instructor who is too timid to ask his mother for permission to eat an extra roti, which is supposed to be charming in that hyper-earnest way that Bollywood movies lean on when they want you to find a grown man wearing pastel cardigans endearingly vulnerable. Shroff spends the first act doing his usual routine of standing very still, flashing a hesitant grin, and occasionally backflipping across a living room because a simple step-stool is simply not an option for someone whose core strength resembles forged steel. His physical commitment is absolute, I will give him that, because the man moves with a liquid, terrifying precision that makes you wonder if his bones are made of rubber bands. When the lightning strikes him and grants him superpowers—or whatever generic cosmic glow-up gives him the ability to hover awkwardly a few feet above the dirt—he doesn't really change his acting register at all. He just puts on a brown leather jacket and a matching mask that leaves his jawline completely exposed, presumably so teenage fans in the balcony can recognize the cheekbones even when he is saving a busload of orphans from falling off a bridge that was clearly constructed out of balsa wood and grey paint.

Jacqueline Fernandez shows up as Kirti, the ecology-obsessed love interest who spends half her screen time lecturing people about carbon footprints while wearing designer outfits that cost more than the average cost of production for an entire parallel-cinema art-house project. She has this running bit where she gets exasperated with Aman's cowardice, rolling her eyes with such theatrical velocity that you worry she might detach a retina before the intermission hits. It is a thankless, paper-thin role that requires her to look concerned, look impressed, and occasionally stand near a potted fern to remind the audience that the script cares deeply about trees. Kay Kay Menon, meanwhile, dials his performance up to an eleven that was probably bolted down just to keep the studio roof from blowing off, playing an evil corporate industrialist named Mr. Raka who wants to pave over the entire earth because he hates green things or maybe just because he really likes expensive waistcoats. Menon chews the scenery with such malicious joy that you start wishing the camera would just abandon Shroff entirely and follow him around his obsidian-lined boardroom as he yells at underpaid extras about toxic waste dumping quotas.

The soundtrack relies heavily on hip-hop beats that sound suspiciously like royalty-free loops downloaded from a bargain-bin music library on a Tuesday afternoon, hammering the same four-note motif every time a character tries to look heroic. It gets grating by the third reel. There's a particular needle-drop during a training montage where an aggressively upbeat pop track plays over shots of Aman learning how to fly by running into a billboard repeatedly, and it cuts off so abruptly on a hard smash-cut to black that the sound designer must have fallen asleep on the mixing desk. The cinematography goes hard on the digital saturation, dipping every exterior sequence in a sickly amber haze that makes Delhi look less like a real metropolis and more like a melted box of crayons left on the dashboard of a taxi in July. One small detail that drove me crazy for no good reason was the sound effect used every time Aman blinked his eyes while hovering; it was a tiny, high-pitched digital chirp, like a smoke detector with a dying nine-volt battery, and it happened every single time he landed on a rooftop. It adds nothing to the scene, establishes zero character depth, and yet it persists like a dull toothache right through the final showdown.

The film desperately wants to say something profound about environmental collapse, corporate greed, and the spiritual bankruptcy of modern urban expansion, but it handles these topics with the subtlety of a falling grand piano. The main villain literally grows larger and stronger by absorbing garbage, which is about as close to a literal heavy-handed metaphor as you are ever going to find in a mainstream commercial release. You half expect a title card to pop up in the corner of the screen telling you to separate your plastics. When compared against something like Krrish, which at least had the budget and the sincere mythological lineage to carry its ridiculous premise with a straight face, this picture feels like a high-school drama club production that somehow accidentally secured a three-crore marketing budget and twenty digital projectors. It treats its audience with a weary condescension, assuming that flashing enough primary colors and computer-generated explosions will distract us from the fact that the narrative has fewer moving parts than a wooden rocking horse.

By the time Nathan Jones shows up as the towering mutant henchman who smells like nuclear waste and fights with the grace of a malfunctioning forklift, the movie has completely abandoned any pretense of logic and decided to just become a live-action cartoon. They have a big dust-up on the moon. Yes, the actual moon. With low gravity and everything, except nobody remembers to make their hair float correctly, which ruins the illusion slightly if you happen to be paying attention to physics instead of checking your watch to see how much runtime is left. The choreography during this lunar brawl consists mostly of two large men throwing each other into grey dust dunes while colored laser beams shoot out of their palms in random directions. It is loud, it is deeply silly, and it goes on for roughly ten minutes longer than any human being with a functional nervous system should be expected to endure in a single sitting.

There is no grand synthesis to be offered here, no neat little concluding sentence that ties the loose threads of direction, performance, and social commentary into a tidy parcel for the reader's convenience. The script just sort of stops happening when everyone gets tired of throwing CGI debris around, leaving our hero standing in a dusty field while the credits roll over a bouncy Punjabi dance track that features a camel wearing tiny sunglasses. It is a baffling choice for a final image, but at least the camel looked like it was having more fun than anyone else on the payroll.