Abhay Deol plays a man who goes by the name Artist, and if I'm honest, that character detail already tells you almost everything you need to know about how this particular strain of streaming comedy operates. It is the sort of naming convention that smells entirely of a writer's room trying desperately to evoke a certain flavor of quirky urban detachment without actually doing the heavy lifting of grounding the person in anything resembling a real socio-economic reality. You get a goat named Cookies thrown into the mix too, which feels less like a narrative choice and more like a desperate cry for algorithmic retention. Netflix has spent the better part of a decade trying to crack the code of the mid-budget Hindi film, usually by throwing eccentric character traits at the wall until something sticks to the glass. Chopsticks exists precisely in that awkward administrative space where a studio wants the indie street cred of a festival pic without alienating anyone who just wants background noise while they fold laundry on a Tuesday afternoon. Sachin Yardi directs with a kind of exhausted efficiency, moving his actors through the frantic streets of Mumbai as if he has a very early flight to catch and needs to wrap the kidnapping plot before his taxi arrives.

Mithila Palkar stars as Nirma, a timid girl who works at a tourist agency and spends her early scenes looking through a pair of oversized spectacles like a human punctuation mark for awkwardness. Her performance relies heavily on the kind of twitchy, wide-eyed earnestness that worked wonders in Karwaan, though here the material asks her to be a perpetual victim of circumstance until the script decides she is suddenly capable of executing a complex extortion scheme. She has a genuine screen presence that keeps the picture from completely falling apart during the laggier stretches, but she is constantly fighting against a screenplay that treats character growth as a series of convenient costume changes. When she finally drops the glasses and lets her hair down, it is less an emotional breakthrough and more a checklist item being violently ticked off by a sleepy director.

Abhay Deol wanders through the frames with the magnificent, distracted energy of someone who agreed to the gig primarily because the location was close to his favorite coffee shop. He plays Artist as a smooth-talking crook who collects stolen goods and dispenses life lessons with equal indifference, sporting a ponytail and a wardrobe that suggests he raided the costume closet of a failed Zoya Akhtar knockoff. He does not stretch himself here, not by a long shot, resting instead entirely on his natural, effortless charm. That charm still works quite well when he has a decent line to sink his teeth into, but too many of his scenes are bogged down by repetitive banter that goes around in circles without actually deepening the dynamic between him and Palkar. It is a performance that coast on pure muscle memory, which makes it mildly frustrating to watch because you know he is capable of genuine danger when a director actually pushes him past his comfort zone.

The cinematography leans into the neon-soaked aesthetics of contemporary digital filmmaking, painting Mumbai in shades of electric blue and sickly amber that feel distinctly divorced from actual grit. Every alleyway looks like it was scrubned clean by a location scout five minutes before the camera rolled, robbing the city of the chaotic texture that made older, rougher Hindi movies feel so alive in your bones. The soundtrack relies on a relentless loop of jazzy basslines and acoustic strumming that tries to tell you how to feel every single second, often stomping all over the punchlines before the actors even finish delivering them. There is a recurring musical sting that plays every time Abhishek Bhalerao’s character, a nervous henchman named Nixon, does something clumsy, and it started grating on my nerves by about the third time it popped up in the first half hour.

Abhishek Bhalerao actually manages to carve out a few genuinely funny moments despite being saddled with the film’s most derivative material, playing the twitchy heavy with a physical commitment that outclasses the dialogue. The supporting cast otherwise drifts through a haze of broad caricatures, particularly the various gangsters and loan sharks who populate the periphery of the plot without ever posing a credible threat to anyone's safety. These villains are drawn with broad strokes, shouting their threats in poorly lit rooms while the camera Dutch-angles the hell out of them to compensate for the total lack of tension. It is a comedy that forgets to be funny for long stretches, preferring instead to coast on the collective goodwill of its cast while the plot mechanics grind along with the mechanical predictability of a conveyor belt.

There is an underlying theme here about self-actualization through petty crime and vehicular theft, which sounds hilarious on paper but translates on screen into a fairly tedious series of negotiations over a stolen car belonging to a local don played by Vijay Raaz. Raaz is entirely wasted in a role that requires him to sit behind a large desk and shout into a vintage telephone, never once getting to flex the comic timing that made him so memorable in Delhi Belly. He looks perpetually bored, and who could blame him when the script keeps looping back to the same repetitive conversations about missing paperwork and mismatched ransom demands. The narrative structure is remarkably slack for a caper film, spending far too much time on filler conversations in cluttered apartments and not nearly enough time on the actual logistics of the heist itself.

Chopsticks ultimately sits in that vast, gray category of digital content that exists because algorithms demand fresh inventory every single week. It is not offensively bad, nor is it particularly memorable, occupying that strange middle ground where you might finish it on a Sunday night and completely forget the name of the protagonist by Wednesday morning. The pacing sags badly in the middle hour when the characters are forced to hide out in a safe house that looks less like a dangerous criminal hideout and more like an Airbnb designed by an exhausted corporate millennial. When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having watched an extended commercial for a lifestyle brand that nobody has actually launched yet. The small moments work better than the big plot machinations, mostly because Palkar and Deol occasionally find a spark of genuine chemistry when the director simply gets out of their way and lets them talk.