Montu Kumar wears his hair in a way that suggests he spends twenty minutes in front of a cracked bathroom mirror every morning trying to look like he didn't care at all. It is a specific kind of small-town Indian vanity, greasy with ambition and entirely devoid of actual leverage, and Rajkummar Rao leans into it with a casualness that borders on exhaustion. He plays the physical educator at a dusty government school in Haryana who treats his job as an extended coffee break with children. He is not a noble underdog yet. He is just a slacker who found the only government job in his zip code that doesn't require him to know math. Hansal Mehta directs him with a loose, unfussed rhythm, letting scenes breathe past the point where a tighter editor would have snipped them away for pacing's sake. The camera lingers on Montu scratching his ear or leaning against a rusted goalpost while students run haphazard laps around a patchy field that is mostly dirt and goat droppings. It feels lived-in, mostly because nobody is rushing to make a point.

The screenplay, co-written by Luv Ranjan, Aseem Arrora, and Zeeshan Quadri, has this weird habit of treating everyday misogyny as a quirky regional accent until it suddenly decides to become an after-school special about women's empowerment. When Montu meets Neelima, played by Nushrat Bharucha with a sharp, no-nonsense bite that occasionally cuts right through the film's softer edges, he immediately tries to police her career choices because his ego is as fragile as cheap tea saucers. Bharucha does a lot of heavy lifting with her eyes, rolling them so hard you can practically hear the inner monologue screaming for better scripts. She is supposed to be the catalyst for his moral awakening, but the script gives her so little to do outside of teaching computer science and looking exasperated that you half-expect her to unionize and walk off the set. The banter between them works when it is petty and small, fueled by shared regional cadence and casual insults traded over bad tea. Once the plot demands that they gaze into each other's eyes and discuss the future of Indian womanhood, the air just leaves the room.

Then Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub shows up as Singh sahab, the rival PT instructor with a military-cut mustache and a terrifying devotion to callisthenics. Ayyub plays him not as a mustache-twirling villain from old-school commercial Hindi films, but as a hyper-competent professional who finds Montu's entire existence deeply offensive. Their rivalry is the spine of the narrative, culminating in a sprawling kabaddi tournament that takes up the entire third act like an unmovable piece of heavy furniture. The sports sequences are shot with an energetic, handheld chaos that occasionally makes it impossible to tell who is tackling whom, but the sheer noise of it all keeps the momentum from completely dying. Mehta has always been more interested in the texture of failure than the cheap rush of victory, which makes the sports climax feel slightly at odds with his usual sensibilities. You can feel the studio notes hanging over the sports field, demanding a cheering crowd and a slow-motion leap of triumph that the director clearly didn't want to film but had to anyway.

The soundtrack by Hitesh Sonik and Guru Randhawa tries very hard to be the pulse of the movie, but it hits the same three upbeat notes until your teeth hurt. There is one particular motivational track that plays every single time Montu has an epiphany, which happens at least four times in the second half, and by the third iteration, it stops sounding like a song and starts sounding like a noise complaint. It’s a small thing that bugged me all afternoon, how lazy needle-drops can pull you right out of a scene that was otherwise working on pure character chemistry. The cinematography by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan captures the harsh, bleached sunlight of a dusty mofussil town without making it look like a glossy tourism brochure. The colors are muted, the sweat looks real, and the dusty classrooms smell of old chalk and damp uniforms through the screen.

There is a recurring argument in Chhalaang about the value of sports versus academics in the broader ecosystem of middle-class anxiety, echoing the parental panic that once made 3 Idiots such a massive cultural behemoth, though without the engineered emotional precision of that earlier blockbuster. Montu argues that playing games teaches you how to lose with dignity, while the parents want their kids memorizing calculus formulas until their eyes bleed. It is a valid tension, deeply rooted in the realities of how modern Indian education systems operate under the weight of hyper-competition and parental projection. Yet the film treats the resolution of this conflict with an almost cartoonish simplicity, as if a single state-level kabaddi match could somehow erase the systemic rot of a grading system designed to crush curiosity. You watch Rao deliver a speech about sportsmanship to a room full of skeptical elders, and while he sells the earnestness of the moment with his usual quiet conviction, the words themselves feel borrowed from a pamphlet.

Bharucha has this one scene where she walks out of a family dinner because her prospective father-in-law makes a casual remark about working women, and the edit lingers on her retreating back for three full seconds after she has already left the frame, a classic editorial misstep that drains the naturalism right out of an otherwise effective character beat. It is these little stumbles in rhythm that keep the movie from achieving the grounded impact of Mehta's earlier work like Shahid or Aligarh, both of which possessed a structural rigor that this project frequently lacks. Here, the tone lurches between low-stakes workplace comedy and earnest social commentary with the grace of a tractor shifting gears on an uphill slope. You spend two hours watching people argue about the necessity of physical education in a society obsessed with engineering degrees, and when the credits finally roll, you realize you haven't really learned anything new about either subject.

It is not a disaster by any stretch, nor is it the kind of fresh, biting satire its premise promises in the opening twenty minutes. It simply exists in that vast, crowded middle tier of contemporary Hindi cinema where good actors are asked to carry mediocre frameworks across the finish line through sheer force of personal charisma. Rao does this so often now that you start to worry he is becoming the designated savior of half-baked scripts about ordinary men finding their spine. He makes Montu's cowardice look genuinely pathetic and his redemption look just messy enough to be believable, even when the dialogue is doing its level best to turn him into a poster boy for grassroots reform. If I am being completely honest, the sports finale drags on about twenty minutes past its expiration date, long after everyone in the audience has already guessed who is going to win the trophy and who is going to learn a valuable lesson about teamwork. The movie wants to leave you cheering, but it mostly just leaves you checking your watch to see if you can still make it to the grocery store before it closes.