Katrina Kaif keeps dropping her cell phone in this movie and every time she does it makes that exact same cheap plastic clatter against the floorboards, which if I am honest started getting to me around the forty-minute mark. Bollywood movies have always had an uncomfortable relationship with gravity, but Siddharth Anand takes that baseline physics-defying instinct and turns it into a high-octane demolition derby that barely pauses for breath. Bang Bang! wants to be a smooth-as-silk Hollywood-style caper imported straight from the cutting rooms of Los Angeles, yet it carries the unmistakable, sweaty enthusiasm of an industry that would rather blow up five more cars than shoot a quiet scene in a hallway. It is a loose adaptation of Knight and Day, which was already a fairly disposable Tom Cruise vehicle that coasted entirely on star wattage and some surprisingly committed stunt choreography, but this version strips away whatever modest self-awareness the original possessed and replaces it with pure, unfiltered spectacle. You get Ron Smoorenburg and Jawed El Berni popping up as disposable muscle to get thrown through various pieces of expensive European architecture, though the camera moves so fast during their fights that you mostly just register limbs flailing against a blurred background.

Siddharth Anand directs like a man who just discovered what a wide-angle lens can do when paired with a drone and a massive budget for stunt coordination. The screenplay by Sujoy Ghosh and Suresh Nair does not bother with the heavy lifting of narrative logic, preferring instead to bounce from Prague to Phuket just so Hrithik Roshan can jump off another very tall thing while wearing a tailored jacket that never gets a single smudge of dirt on the lapels. There are moments in the chase sequences where the cutting gets so aggressive that you lose track of which direction the cars are even driving, trading actual spatial geography for the vague sensation of speed. It is loud, it is brightly colored, and it treats plot holes not as problems to be fixed but as wide-open spaces to drive a jet ski across. Danny Denzongpa shows up as the heavy with an eyepatch and a deep voice, chewing on his minimal dialogue as if he knows the entire production is just killing time between explosions. Javed Jafrey and Pavan Malhotra pop in and out to provide some exposition that nobody is really listening to, because the audience is busy waiting for the next time Hrithik takes his shirt off or fires an assault rifle underwater.

Hrithik Roshan walks through this entire enterprise with the arrogant, terrifying ease of a man who knows he is the best-looking person in any room on the planet, and frankly he uses that fact to carry a script that would sink almost anyone else. He plays Raj/Harveen, or whatever his character's actual alias is this week, with a perpetual half-smirk that suggests he is in on a joke the rest of us are only reading about in the trades. When he dances, which happens whenever the plot needs a mandatory twenty-minute cooling-off period, the movie suddenly remembers how to breathe. Katrina Kaif has a much harder time as Harleen, the bank receptionist who gets sucked into the international spy ring because she happened to use a dating app at the wrong moment, mostly because she spends ninety percent of her screen time shrieking or staring in wide-eyed disbelief at things that would kill a normal human being. Her chemistry with Hrithik is undeniable, even if the script reduces her to a screaming passenger who occasionally gets to hold a gun and look confused. They sell the ridiculous romance through sheer physical symmetry, standing next to each other on sandy beaches and windy rooftops like living magazine covers that someone accidentally animated.

Vishal-Shekhar's soundtrack hits the standard commercial notes without leaving much of a cultural footprint, though the title track has a swaggering bassline that stays stuck in your head long after the credits roll. The cinematography by Sunil Patel leans hard into the tourist-brochure aesthetic, bathing every European cobblestone and Thai island in golden-hour sunlight that makes everything look slightly unreal, like a digital painting of a vacation you can't afford. It matches the general tone of Hindi films from this era that were trying desperately to court the global diaspora by shooting entirely in foreign locations where the locals look like extras hired off the street in London. There is a weightlessness to the digital compositing during the action beats that reminds you of Dhoom 2, another picture where Hrithik played a charismatic rogue who treated law enforcement like a mild inconvenience. Yet where that earlier film had a certain comic-book sleaziness that worked in its favor, this one feels sanded down by committee until every sharp edge has been smoothed away into harmless, expensive noise.

The thematic undercurrents of the film are practically non-existent, unless you count the deeply held conviction that government agencies are universally corrupt and the only people you can trust are incredibly attractive men with good dental work who can fly airplanes while bleeding from the shoulder. It touches on themes of identity and trust in the digital age, but only in the most superficial way possible, using stolen Koh-i-Noor diamonds as a shiny plot mcguffin to get our leads from one picturesque disaster to the next. The bad guys have no real ideology beyond wanting to be rich and powerful, and the good guys are just doing whatever it takes to clear their names, meaning the stakes are purely emotional and entirely dependent on whether you care if these two gorgeous people ever manage to hold hands in peace. There is a strange conservatism lurking beneath the glossy surfaces of many contemporary Indian cinema blockbusters, where characters must eventually return to traditional family structures even after spending two hours blowing up half of Eastern Europe, but here even that lip service feels phoned in.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around on a yacht that is currently being riddled with heavy artillery fire, you realize the movie has stopped trying to make sense of its own geography about an hour ago and you have stopped caring. It is a piece of disposable pop entertainment that spends hundreds of crores to give you exactly what you expect and nothing more, which is either a relief or a disappointment depending on how much patience you brought to the theater. Hrithik manages to keep it all afloat through sheer force of personality, sliding down glass roofs and hanging off helicopters with a casual disregard for his own mortality that is genuinely impressive to watch. The supporting cast does what they can with roles that consist mostly of pointing at computer screens and shouting about satellite feeds. If you want a masterclass in narrative efficiency, look elsewhere, but if you just want to watch a very tall man shoot people while wearing a leather jacket in slow motion, the machinery hums along quite efficiently until the very end.