There is a specific kind of digital color grading that makes every dark room look like it was scrubbed with laundry detergent, and Operation Mayfair starts right there in that sterile, blue-tinted void. Jimmy Shergill has played this exact cop so many times across various Hindi films that he appears to have memorized his blocking before stepping out of the trailer, wearing a leather jacket that creaks with every sigh. If I'm honest, the opening scene is just people shouting about jurisdiction while standing around a table with a laptop open to a generic spreadsheet, establishing very little besides the fact that someone has died somewhere expensive. Director Sudipto Sarkar wants us to feel the weight of a sprawling international conspiracy right away, but the production design keeps getting in the way by looking like an abandoned co-working space in suburban London rented for the weekend. The screenplay piles exposition onto characters who have no business talking that much about dark web cartels, turning what should be a straightforward procedural into a sequence of endless meetings where the coffee cups are always empty and weightless.

Shergill anchors the chaos with a weary, half-asleep competence that saves the movie from completely falling apart during the second act. He doesn't bother chewing the scenery because the scenery is mostly just hotel hallways and grey pavement, so he settles for a kind of glazed-in-amber fatigue that feels earned after decades of dodging substandard material in mainstream Hindi cinema. Hritiqa Chheber and Chris Wilson pop up in supporting slots to deliver English dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a completely different genre of movie, struggling with the cadence required for lines about human organs and illegal cryptocurrency. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often actors in the background would pretend to type on dead keyboards while staring directly into the lens during interrogation sequences. This brings to mind the messy supporting dynamics of something like Race 3, where nobody quite seems to occupy the same physical space or share the same understanding of gravity, leaving the nominal stars to flounder against props that wobble when touched.

The cinematography relies heavily on drone shots of London landmarks that appear to have been purchased from a stock footage site during a clearance sale, cutting back and forth between foggy parks and neon-lit alleys without any geographical coherence. Whenever the editing needs to signal tension, it chops the dialogue into jagged fragments and slaps a bass-heavy drone on the soundtrack that drowns out whatever the actors are mumbling under their breath. That particular synth hum repeats at least five times during every conversation about the missing ledger, wearing out its welcome before the forty-minute mark even arrives. Yet there are moments when the camera lingers too long on a background extra reading a newspaper upside down, a charmingly lazy oversight that suggests nobody checked the dailies before locking the cut. The sound design tries to compensate for the flat visual palette by turning up the Foley work on every footstep and jacket rustle until the audio mix feels like someone chewing gravel directly into your ear canal.

Beneath the procedural mechanics, the film wants to say something urgent about globalization and the invisible supply chains that feed billionaire vices, but it gets bogged down in endless scenes of people explaining the plot to other people who should already know it. Characters drive across town just to deliver information that could have been handled in a quick phone call, mostly to pad the runtime and give the lighting crew another chance to turn on their blue gels. Bollywood movies have always struggled with the logistics of international crime stories, usually because the budgets required to make London or New York look lived-in are entirely different from the cash available for these mid-tier co-productions. The thematic ambitions of the script—tackling exploitation in high-end medical tourism—are admirable on paper, but they dissolve into standard revenge tropes the moment Shergill has to corner the primary villain in a damp parking garage.

The supporting villain played by Chris Wilson lacks any real menace, shuffling around in dark suits while delivering threats with the enthusiasm of a man waiting for his Uber eats order to arrive in the rain. Hindi movies used to treat their antagonists with a bit more theatrical flair, but here we get corporate boardrooms and muted color palettes where nobody even raises their voice above a conversational drone during a shootout. When the climax arrives, it resolves through a series of coincidences that make the preceding ninety minutes of detective work feel entirely pointless, ending on a frozen reaction shot of Shergill looking mildly inconvenienced by a plot twist everyone saw coming during the opening credits. There is no grand statement here, just a collection of genre tropes stacked haphazardly together until the budget ran out.