Ajay Devgn wears khaki the way other actors wear tailored Brioni, which is to say he looks less like he is playing a policeman and more like the uniform was grown from his shoulders after years of slow exposure to harsh sunlight and bureaucratic indifference. Rohit Shetty’s Singham Returns is an aggressively loud and stubbornly old-fashioned machine that grinds away for nearly two and a half hours, rarely stopping to catch its breath or let the audience look at anything subtler than a flying Scorpio. If I'm honest, the first half hour moves with the grace of a tractor pulling a stalled bus out of a ditch. The narrative machinery is clunky, relying heavily on exposition dumps delivered by characters standing awkwardly in front of oversized maps and dusty filing cabinets. We rejoin Bajirao Singham as a deputy commissioner of police now stationed in Mumbai, a city that appears to have been washed in a permanent sepia filter of perpetual crisis and looming threats from shadowy political syndicates. He has traded the humid rusticity of the Goa coast for the claustrophobic concrete canyons of the metropolis, though his preferred method of dispute resolution remains stubbornly physical. The screenplay by Yunus Sajawal and Farhad-Sajid takes the basic structural skeleton of the first film and scales it up until every single frame is groaning under the sheer weight of amplified bass and screaming extras. It’s loud. It’s exhausting. It’s also weirdly committed to its own ridiculous gravity.

There is a specific scene where Devgn launches himself off the hood of a moving jeep while firing a pistol into the air that made me wonder if physics had simply taken a permanent vacation from Bollywood movies. The direction lacks the kinetic flow one might find in a tighter genre exercise like Dabangg, choosing instead to rely on sudden, jarring shifts in tone that lurch from broad romantic comedy to operatic political melodrama without bothering to build a bridge between them. Kareena Kapoor plays Avni, a local activist with an irritating habit of speaking in rhyming couplets and treating serious municipal corruption like a street theatre workshop, and her chemistry with Devgn feels forced through a mangle of half-baked comedic bits that outstay their welcome by at least ten minutes. Every time Kapoor enters a room, the soundtrack swells with a cheerful, synthesized accordion cue that repeats so often it began to feel like a mild form of psychological torture. Yet the film possesses a strange, hypnotic momentum once it gets past the initial setup. Shetty knows how to frame a face against a low-angle sky so that even a mundane line about jurisdiction sounds like an existential threat. The dialogue is written entirely in capital letters, punctuated by dramatic pauses where characters stare intensely into the middle distance while lightning flashes behind them whether it's raining or not.

Anupam Kher shows up as a beleaguered police chief who spends most of his screen time rubbing his temples and muttering about departmental budget cuts, a role he can probably play in his sleep by now. The real discovery of the supporting cast, however, is Amole Gupte as Baba Ji, a fraudulent spiritual guru who wears immaculate white linen and runs a sprawling ashram that serves as a front for black money and election rigging. Gupte doesn't chew the scenery so much as he swallows it whole, dipping it in mustard oil and washing it down with cold buttermilk. His performance is a masterclass in oily menace, shifting effortlessly from beatific smiles for the television cameras to venomous whispers behind locked doors. When he leans across a polished mahogany desk to threaten a junior minister, you can practically smell the expensive aftershave and calculated hypocrisy radiating from the screen. Devgn plays off this with a stony silence, using his trademark slow squint to convey a world-weary skepticism that grounds the more outlandish elements of the plot. He doesn't need to shout to command the frame. He just stands there, hands locked behind his back, looking like a granite milestone that refuses to move no matter how hard the political winds blow against it.

The cinematography by Dudley relies heavily on a palette of bruised blues and aggressive oranges, turning every street corner in Mumbai into a stage set designed exclusively for vehicular destruction. Cars don't just crash in this universe; they pirouette, they catch fire with theatrical promptness, and they disintegrate into small, neat piles of scrap metal that never seem to inconvenience the pedestrians walking past in the background. The editing is frantic, sometimes cutting away from a conversation before the final syllable of a sentence has even registered, which keeps the energy level high even when the logic of the scene is collapsing inward. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the boom mic dips into the upper frame of a crucial interrogation scene in the second reel, hanging there like an unwelcome spectator for three full seconds before someone remembers to pull it up. These little technical slips happen more than once, suggesting a rushed post-production schedule where nobody had the time to go back and polish the rough edges. The soundtrack by Devi Sri Prasad and Jeet Gannguli is an unrelenting assault of brass instruments and pounding drums that follow Singham down every hallway, ensuring the audience never forgets for a single second that a righteous hero is currently walking down that hallway.

Beneath the bluster of flying bodies and shouted monologues, the film attempts to engage with serious questions about the commercialization of religion and the cozy relationship between spiritual organizations and state-level politicians. It’s an interesting angle for a mainstream Hindi film to explore, even if the treatment is about as subtle as a brick wrapped in a saffron flag. The narrative treats religious fraud not as a theological debate but as a law-and-order problem that can eventually be solved with a sufficiently heavy right hook and an honest press conference. This makes for a fascinating ideological contradiction where the system is simultaneously corrupt beyond repair and yet completely salvaging if the right man in a creased uniform decides to bend the rules. We watch as ordinary citizens are manipulated by media barons and fake holy men, only to be saved by a lone wolf who operates outside the judicial process because the courts are simply too slow. It’s a familiar formula that has powered commercial cinema for decades, reflecting a deep-seated public anxiety about institutional decay and the desperate desire for a benevolent, muscular authority figure to fix things with minimal paperwork.

The closing stretch abandons any remaining pretense of narrative coherence in favor of an extended, twenty-minute brawl inside a sprawling industrial warehouse where every single bad guy gets his turn to be thrown through a pane of glass. It goes on for so long that the novelty of the destruction wears off, replaced by a dull, rhythmic ache in the lower back as you watch stuntmen bounce off trampolines hidden behind rusted oil drums. Devgn delivers his final speech about the sanctity of the vote with the kind of deadpan sincerity that makes it impossible to laugh at the absurdity of the moment, even when he’s delivering it through a split lip and a torn shirt. There is no grand artistic revelation here, nor is there any attempt to reinvent the wheel that has kept the commercial cinema industry turning for generations. It is loud, unapologetic pulp that knows exactly who its audience is and refuses to apologize for giving them precisely what they bought tickets to see.