That mustard-yellow safari suit Ajay Devgn wears in the first reel has a collar wide enough to catch radio waves from the Arabian Sea, and honestly, that’s about as subtle as the period styling gets in Milan Luthria’s sprawling Mumbai underworld drama. Hindi films love a good nostalgia trip back to the seventies smuggling boom, usually drowning the screen in sepia filters until every actor looks like they’ve been marinated in instant coffee, but this one actually cleans up the lens and lets the past look sharp, even if the plotting occasionally sags under the weight of its own mythological ambitions. Rajat Arora’s dialogue sounds less like things human beings ever said to each other across a dimly lit restaurant table and more like a collection of laminated placards designed to be quoted back by teenagers on motorcycles, which isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker when the actors lean into the grandiosity with this much leather-jacketed conviction.

Devgn plays Sultan Mirza, the benevolent don who runs the docks with a paternalistic grin and a strict code about not trafficking in white powder, functioning as a kind of cinematic ancestor to Shah Rukh Khan's brooding anti-heroes, though with far less nervous energy and a lot more practiced stillness. He operates in that cinematic sweet spot where a mere tilt of the chin communicates decades of weary authority, anchoring the picture whenever the narrative threatens to drift off into repetitive montages of guys in bell-bottoms walking slowly down dimly lit corridors while electric guitars twang. Beside him, Emraan Hashmi tackles Shoaib Khan, the hungry upstart whose ambition lacks any of Sultan's self-imposed boundaries, playing him with a twitchy, predatory edge that makes you feel like you need to check your wallet just watching him lean against a pillar. Hashmi doesn't bother trying to make Shoaib likable, which keeps the picture from collapsing into the usual moralizing mush where bad men always have hearts of gold tucked away behind their velvet waistcoats, even if his wardrobe occasionally makes him look like an extra from a forgotten disco fever dream.

The romantic tracks feel grafted on from an entirely different afternoon matinee, dragging Kangna Ranaut and Prachi Desai through a series of mournful gazes by sea-facing windows that frankly slow the momentum down to a crawl. Ranaut does what she can with a character written mostly as a decorative accessory who exists to sigh dramatically whenever Devgn adjusts his aviator sunglasses, while Desai plays the sweet neighborhood girl with a persistent blink that suggests she’s trying to send distress signals to the projectionist. It’s a small thing but it bugged me how every time these women appear on screen, the soundtrack swells with the exact same melancholic violin motif until you want to scream at the speakers for a little peace and quiet. Randeep Hooda pops up later as an investigating officer with a permanent five-o'clock shadow and a world-weary grunt, giving the cat-and-mouse dynamic a bit of necessary grit that keeps the second half from turning entirely into a theatrical fan-club convention for its two leads.

Luthria shoots the city like a sunburned memory where every rooftop overlooks a potential betrayal and every dock worker has an opinion on the price of gold, leaning heavily on golden-hour lighting that makes the grime of old Bombay look suspiciously glamorous. Pritam’s soundtrack works overtime to establish the mood, recycling rhythmic tabla slaps and chorus chants that are catchy enough on the third hearing, though they tend to overstay their welcome during scenes where characters are simply staring pensively at the horizon. The editing rhythm occasionally stumbles during the fight sequences, cutting away from punches just a fraction too early to hide the stunt doubles' faces, a clumsy habit that pulls you right out of the illusion of underworld menace. Gauhar Khan makes a brief, memorable impression in a dance number that arrives out of nowhere and leaves just as quickly, serving as a reminder that these productions used to know how to stop the plot dead for four minutes of sheer visual rhythm without apologizing for it.

There is an underlying friction here between old-school code and modern ruthlessness that gives the film its actual engine, far more than any of the specific turf wars or police raids orchestrated by the supporting cast, which includes reliable character actors like Avtar Gill chewing the scenery with practiced ease. Sultan believes in a world where you protect your own and respect the syndicate's boundaries, whereas Shoaib views every rule as an invitation to commit arson, representing the exact generational shift that Hollywood captured so well in gangster pictures half a century ago without needing to explain the socio-economic factors every ten minutes. This generational clash saves the narrative from becoming just another checklist of period clichés, driving the conflict toward a confrontation on a rain-slicked rooftop that delivers the required emotional punch without requiring anyone to spell out the thematic subtext in neon letters. It runs a bit too long in the middle, and the CGI backdrop of the old skyline occasionally looks like a screensaver from a 2004 desktop computer, but the sheer momentum of the central rivalry carries it past the rough patches. When the credits finally roll, you aren't thinking about the historical inaccuracies or the somewhat predictable rise-and-fall trajectory familiar from dozens of other hindi movies, but rather the stubborn, heavy-lidded stare Devgn gives the camera right before the screen goes black.