Riteish Deshmukh plays a dwarf in Marjaavaan, and if I am honest, the sheer audacity of how that character is introduced does sort of set a mood even if you wish it didn't. He spends two hours kneeling on platforms and glowering from the shadows while everyone else towers above him like redwoods in a terrible rainstorm. It is a loud, sweaty piece of work, the kind of movie that looks at the gutter-level romance of the nineties and decides that what those stories really missed was twenty thousand liters of fake rain and at least forty slow-motion walk-ups to burning effigies. Sidharth Malhotra wears a permanent leather jacket that probably cost more than my first second-hand hatchback, playing a mute enforcer who breaks fingers with the casual indifference of a guy checking his watch at a bus stop. He has two expressions, which is actually one more than he managed in Baar Baar Dekho, and both of them involve staring into the middle distance while dramatic thunder cracks right on cue. Milan Milap Zaveri directs with the restraint of a man hitting a piñata with a metal pipe, ensuring that every single frame feels like it was dipped in cheap oil and left to bake in a Delhi parking lot.

The plot moves from one blood-soaked alley to the next without bothering to stop for things like narrative logic or character growth. Raghu is the loyal lapdog to a local don who controls the water supply and the local tenements, and his life consists mostly of cracking skulls and listening to cassette tapes of vintage poetry until Tara Sutaria shows up playing a deaf-mute music teacher who communicates entirely through soulful gazing and very clean kurtas. She gets shot after about forty-five minutes because Hindi movies have this weird obsession with dispatching female leads the second they start to get interesting, leaving Sidharth to spend the rest of the runtime crying giant, perfectly manicured tears into the dirt. The screenplay treats dialogue like a series of rhyming couplets written by an edgy teenager on a late-night bus ride, tossing around lines about death and honor with such relentless enthusiasm that even the sound effects guy starts turning the volume down during the heavier exchanges. It is all terribly earnest, which might be why it feels so exhausting to sit through on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when you just wanted a nap.

Tara Sutaria doesn't actually have lines, which some might consider a blessing given how the rest of the cast handles the script, but she manages to look mournful in every single lighting condition known to modern digital cameras. Riteish Deshmukh chews the scenery until his jaw has to be hurting, barking orders while wearing dark kohl that makes him look like a Victorian ghost who got lost on his way to a heavy metal concert. Then there is the supporting cast of various heavies who exist solely to be thrown through glass tables or kicked off balconies into conveniently placed heaps of empty cardboard boxes. It is a punishing rhythm, mostly because nobody on screen ever talks at a normal conversational volume. They either whisper ominous threats into each other's ears or scream at the top of their lungs while rain pours down their faces from hidden hoses.

Cinematographer Ravi Walia lights every single confrontation in shades of cobalt blue and arterial crimson, making the slums look like an upscale nightclub where somebody just knocked over the cocktail machine. The editing cuts away from impact zones just a fraction of a second too early, which is a small thing but it bugged me every single time it happened because you never quite get the satisfaction of seeing a punch land properly. The soundtrack relies heavily on recycled melodies that keep popping up during every emotional beat, sometimes three times in the same ten-minute stretch, until you find yourself humming the chorus purely out of Stockholm syndrome. It is a heavy-handed approach to melodrama that belongs in a different decade, though even back then people probably would have asked for a bit more breathing room between the tragedy and the next fistfight.

There is an underlying morality to these stories where violence is treated as a form of poetry, a way for broken men to express feelings they are otherwise too stoic to mention over dinner. Raghu doesn't talk, so he kills people with iron rods instead, and the camera treats these brutal interventions with the kind of reverent awe usually reserved for religious processions. It is an old-fashioned brand of storytelling that refuses to acknowledge the twenty-first century exists outside of better camera sensors and digital grading suites. When the local police show up, they basically stand around like oversized traffic cones waiting for the principals to finish their shouting matches before anyone remembers there is supposed to be a law.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around inside a muddy courtyard filled with burning tires, you are mostly just wondering if the stunt coordinator got hazard pay for working in those boots. Marjaavaan isn't trying to reinvent the medium or offer profound social commentary on urban poverty, it just wants to see how many times a man can fly through a wooden door without breaking his spine on the other side. It is aggressively loud, wonderfully silly, and entirely uninterested in your patience or your good taste.