Abhishek Bachchan wears a cheap suit in the first third of Mani Ratnam's Guru that looks like it was bought off a rack in a dusty provincial railway station, and that specific costuming choice tells you more about the character's relentless rise than any of the dialogue ever manages to do. There is a sweat-soaked desperation clinging to the man from Gujarat who steps off a train into Bombay with zero capital and a head full of schemes that border on the pathological, sweating under hot studio lights that are meant to look like humid Indian streets. If I'm honest, the film takes a good twenty minutes to figure out its own footing after the village prologue, stumbling through tonal shifts that feel slightly cobbled together from three different editing bays.

Ratnam shoots Bombay like a beast waiting to be fed, framing skyscrapers and tenement rooftops through a lens that never settles on a single mood. Rajiv Menon handles the camera work with a restless energy that occasionally makes you reach for the armrests, panning across roaring stock exchange floors and quiet, sun-baked village courtyards with equal abandon. A.R. Rahman delivers a score that leans heavily into synthesizers and choral swells, though that recurring flute motif pops up three times too many during the romantic interludes and starts to feel like a bludgeon.

Bachchan junior plays Gurukant Desai with an intensity that borders on unhinged, screaming at bureaucrats and laughing maniacally in empty boardrooms while his hair greys in patches that look slightly artificial under the harsh close-up lighting. He is tracking a trajectory that feels less like a traditional rags-to-riches Hindi movie arc and more like a slow descent into monomania where success becomes the only oxygen left in the room. Aishwarya Rai matches him beat for beat as Sujata, anchoring the madness with a quiet, stubborn dignity that prevents the picture from tipping entirely over into melodrama, especially in those silent reaction shots where she just stares at her husband across a crowded room and lets her eyes do the heavy lifting.

Madhavan plays the crusading journalist with a thin mustache and an irritatingly righteous posture that recalls his breakout turn in Yuva, snapping his notebooks shut with a theatrical click every time he uncovers another offshore shell company. That reporter character is supposed to represent the moral conscience of the nation or whatever, but he mostly comes off as a scold who needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Mallika Sherawat pops up for a bizarre cabaret number that stalls the momentum dead in its tracks just when the narrative engine is finally starting to purr with actual dramatic heat.

The screenplay borrows heavily from the life of Dhirubhai Ambani without ever having the guts to name him or dig into the actual dirt of corporate malfeasance, preferring instead to paint corporate greed as a grand, romantic crusade against a repressive socialist state that hated businessmen who wanted to build things. You get massive crowds chanting slogans outside courtrooms, union leaders shaking their fists at glass-fronted towers, and old men nodding sagely while Mithun Chakraborty delivers his lines with the world-weary gravity of a school principal who has caught too many boys smoking behind the bike sheds. That dynamic between Chakraborty's upright editor and Bachchan's ruthless capitalist forms the emotional backbone of the entire enterprise, even when the plot mechanics get bogged down in endless scenes of men in grey flannel suits shouting over ledgers.

Hindi cinema has spent decades churning out variations of the angry young man trope, yet this particular iteration trades Amitabh Bachchan's bruised working-class rage for an entrepreneurial hunger that feels oddly contemporary to the liberalized markets of the nineties. The women in these stories usually get relegated to kitchen corners or tearful porch swings, but Rai's character carves out a genuine partnership that survives boardroom coups and paralytic strokes through sheer stubbornness. Vidya Balan has a heartbreaking cameo as a wheelchair-bound neighbor whose quiet suffering gives the early village scenes an emotional weight that the flashier corporate shenanigans later on occasionally struggle to match. Arya Babbar and Kunal Kapoor fill out the margins with varying degrees of success, though some of the supporting dialogue sounds clearly dubbed in a small room three weeks after the cameras stopped rolling.

The courtroom climax goes on about ten minutes too long, with Bachchan shouting about his right to dream while judges look on with expressions of profound, middle-class exhaustion that mirror the audience's own fatigue by that point in the runtime. It wants to be an epic about the birth of modern Indian capitalism, but it works much better as a sweaty, intimate character study of a man who loved power more than people and expected everyone else to forgive him because he built them a better factory. The soundtrack swells one last time as the credits roll over a montage of old photographs, leaving you with the strange feeling that you have just watched a very expensive commercial for ambition.