Neil Nitin Mukesh has a very specific kind of smirk that he deploys whenever his character is supposed to be the smartest person in any given room, which is often, and if I'm honest, it starts wearing thin about twenty minutes before the first intermission arrives. We are looking at Players, the official Hindi remake of The Italian Job, or rather the 2003 American version of The Italian Job, which means we are dealing with a pedigree of heist cinema that was already somewhat airless to begin with. Abbas-Mustan took the blueprint, swapped Venice for the grey, rain-slicked concrete of New Zealand, and promptly forgot that motor vehicles require a sense of weight to be thrilling. A red Mini Cooper used to feel like a toy with purpose in past iterations of this story. Here, the cars zip around like rendered graphics from a mid-tier console game, lacking friction, lacking the grease and heat of actual internal combustion, just sliding across asphalt while the background blurs past with algorithmic indifference.

The direction relies entirely on that dizzying, nauseating zoom-in whip-pan technique that directors use when they want to convince an audience that something urgent is happening even if two people are just standing in a hotel lobby having a deeply boring conversation about coin lockers and gold bullion. Abbas and Mustan Burmawalla have made a very long career out of matching suits and sudden plot twists, but their touch has grown so automated that you can practically hear the editing suite humming behind every frame. The screenplay, credited to Rohit Jugraj and Sudip Sharma, attempts to pad out the runtime by giving every single member of the core crew a tragic backstory involving fathers, betrayals, or prison terms, none of which stick because the movie is in too much of a hurry to get to the next drone shot of a suspension bridge. Abhishek Bachchan wanders through this neon-lit chaos with the weary expression of a man who realizes he left his oven on back home, anchoring the ensemble not through intense charisma but through sheer unbothered presence while everyone else shouts their lines over a booming Pritam score that never takes a single breath.

There is a sequence involving a train, a remote-controlled helicopter, and about four tons of stolen gold where the geography of the action simply ceases to exist. One second a character is standing on the roof of a carriage, and the next they are inside the cabin looking at a laptop, and then suddenly the train is on a different track entirely, and the editing is so frantic that you cannot tell if they are moving north, south, or sideways. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often the continuity department just gave up on matching actors' eye lines during dialogue exchanges inside the moving trucks, cutting back and forth between Bipasha Basu and Sonam Kapoor with such casual disregard for spatial awareness that you feel like you are watching two separate movies edited together by someone who only had twenty minutes before lunch. Sonam Kapoor plays a hacker who supposedly possesses genius-level intelligence, yet she spends ninety percent of her screen time adjusting her scarves and looking mildly concerned at computer screens that are mostly displaying green cascading text reminiscent of The Matrix, a reference point that feels terribly dated even for two thousand and twelve.

Bipasha Basu gets saddled with the femme fatale routines, wearing leather jackets in situations that clearly call for sensible knitwear, and she sells the physical demands of the role with a degree of commitment that the actual material does not deserve. Every time she has to kick someone, she puts her whole spine into it, which makes the surrounding actors look a bit stiff by comparison, especially Sikander Kher, who plays the muscle and spends most of his scenes grunting in low lighting while chewing on toothpicks. Neil Nitin Mukesh, meanwhile, chews scenery with an enthusiasm that borders on the aggressive, his dialogue delivered in that deliberate, low-register whisper that Bollywood movies lean on whenever they want to signal that a character is mentally unstable or operating on a higher plane of malice. It reminds you of how much more grounded Vivek Oberoi was in Company, where the villainy felt messy and desperate rather than pre-rehearsed in front of a mirror.

The soundtrack by Pritam has a couple of tracks that try to mimic international club hits, but they are mixed so loud in the sound design that dialogue scenes immediately following a musical number require you to manually adjust your volume just to hear what the characters are whispering about their elaborate revenge plot. Hindi cinema has always had a complicated relationship with logic during action set pieces, but usually, the emotional stakes are high enough that you forgive the physics defying stunts and the miraculous escapes. Here, the characters are so thinly sketched that their eventual betrayals and double-crosses elicit about as much emotional response as watching someone sort their junk mail. You know the gold is going to get stolen, you know someone is going to double-cross the leader in a dimly lit warehouse, and you know there will be a final confrontation on an airfield where everyone shoots twenty rounds from automatic rifles without ever hitting a vital organ.

Cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran usually brings a gorgeous, luminous quality to his frames, but the color grading here has been cranked so high into teal-and-orange territory that every outdoor scene looks like it was filtered through a muddy Instagram preset from the early days of mobile photography. The Auckland locations, which should look grand and imposing, are reduced to grey blurs behind endless shots of actors leaning against expensive sports cars while wearing sunglasses at twilight. It feels less like a globetrotting adventure and more like a very expensive tourist board commercial that got hijacked by pyromaniacs who refused to read the script.

By the time the safe is finally cracked for the third time, you are no longer invested in who gets the money or who gets arrested because the film has exhausted every narrative trick in its book inside the first sixty minutes. The supporting cast members cycle in and out of scenes like extras on a studio backlot, granted lines of exposition that they deliver with glazed expressions, waiting for their next chance to drive a red car off a ramp or pose with an assault rifle against a sunset. There is no joy in the mechanics of the caper, only a grinding, repetitive adherence to genre tropes that have been worn smooth by decades of inferior imitations. It stands as an object lesson in how not to adapt foreign properties for local audiences, stripping away whatever charm the original possessed and replacing it with loud noises and hollow posturing.