The sound design during the opening skirmish of War Chhod Na Yaar is genuinely loud, not in that immersive, theater-shaking Dolby Atmos way, but in the flat, over-compressed style of a television commercial break that refuses to let up even when the camera cuts to a wide shot of two actors standing four hundred feet apart in a dusty field pretending to lob grenades at each other. It is a strange way to start a satire about the absurdity of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, though if I'm honest, the sheer brazenness of the sound mixing almost distracted me from how utterly empty the frame looked for the first five minutes. Far too many Bollywood comedies assume that if you turn the volume up on the foley track every time a boot hits gravel, the audience will forget that the background looks like an abandoned municipal park outside Pune rather than the high-altitude border zone the screenplay keeps insisting we are inhabiting.

Director Faraz Haider clearly wanted to channel the chaotic, systemic absurdities of something like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or at least aim for the frantic, fourth-wall-breaking energy of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, but he lacked the narrative discipline to keep the tone from sliding into the sort of broad, ear-splitting farce that usually gets broadcast on Sunday afternoons when everyone in the house is half-asleep on the sofa. The screenplay is structured like a series of sketches that forgot they were supposed to connect to each other, resulting in a narrative rhythm that jerks forward and backward without any internal logic, occasionally pausing for ten minutes of heavy-handed moralizing about the futility of war before abruptly pivoting back to a gag involving a cow wandering into a landmine testing site. Sharman Joshi plays an Indian army captain with a perpetually furrowed brow that suggests he is trying to remember if he left his oven on back in Delhi, while Mukul Dev plays his Pakistani counterpart across the fence with an identical expression of vague exhaustion, both of them trapped in a comedic premise that ran out of gas before the interval card even had a chance to drop.

There is a specific kind of supporting performance in hindi cinema that relies entirely on an actor shouting their dialogue as if the sound recordist was standing outside in the parking lot, and Sanjay Mishra unfortunately gets saddled with several scenes where he has to do the heavy lifting for jokes that simply do not have any punchlines attached to them. He wanders around in various disguises, muttering commentary about politicians and defense budgets, and while Mishra usually possesses the deadpan comic timing to rescue weak material, here he looks stranded, delivering punchlines with the weary resignation of a man who knows the editing room is going to cut away to a reaction shot of a goat three frames too early. It is a small thing, but it bugged me throughout the second half: every single time a character tells a joke, the camera lingers on Soha Ali Khan for precisely one beat longer than necessary, forcing her to smile politely at a punchline that was already old when Border came out in cinemas.

Speaking of Soha Ali Khan, her role as a television journalist is largely comprised of walking through various outdoor locations holding a microphone and looking deeply concerned about geopolitical tensions while wearing clothes that appear to have come straight from a high-end boutique in Bandra rather than a war zone. She tries her best to anchor the satirical elements of the plot, but the script gives her dialogue that sounds like a series of Wikipedia paragraphs read aloud by someone who just drank three espressos, making her scenes feel less like a narrative intervention and more like an editorial board meeting inserted directly into the middle of a slapstick routine. Meanwhile, Jaaved Jaaferi pops up as an arms dealer with an eccentric accent and a collection of props that belong in a school play, chewing the scenery with an enthusiasm that feels slightly embarrassing to watch in an era when hindi movies have largely moved past this kind of broad caricature.

Cinematographer Saurabh Goswami shoots the border sequences with a desaturated yellow filter that makes everything look as though it was filmed through a dirty windshield, draining the landscape of any natural texture and turning the mountains into flat cardboard cutouts. The editing by Manish More does not help matters, often dropping reaction shots in the middle of dialogue exchanges that completely kill the comedic rhythm, leaving actors hanging mid-sentence while the audience tries to figure out why we are suddenly looking at a medium close-up of a rusted jeep tire. It is a deeply disjointed viewing experience that stumbles from one set-piece to the next without ever establishing a consistent visual grammar, making it hard to care about the fate of the soldiers on either side of the barbed wire.

The soundtrack is a collection of forgettable numbers that pop up with the structural predictability of a grandfather clock, usually interrupting the momentum of scenes just as they are beginning to find some comedic footing. One particular song about peace and brotherhood feels like it was put together in an afternoon using a preset rhythm loop from a 2005-era synthesizer, featuring lyrics that spell out the film's anti-war message with the subtlety of a falling anvil. It plays twice in full, which is at least one time too many for a track that sounds like a rejected jingle for a public service announcement.

Satire requires a certain amount of precision and a clear target, but War Chhod Na Yaar mostly just throws ideas at the wall to see what sticks, ranging from media critique to political corruption to the absurdity of daily military protocols without ever committing to any single angle long enough for it to make an impact. The film wants to be a lighthearted takedown of jingoism, yet it relies on the exact same broad stereotypes it is ostensibly trying to subvert, creating a strange ideological muddle where the jokes punch down even when the script thinks it is aiming for the generals in the command tent. It is an exhausting watch, not because it is offensive or genuinely malicious, but because it lacks the basic craftsmanship required to make its own jokes land.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around involving a poorly choreographed standoff and a speech about humanity that sounds cribbed from a greeting card, the movie has completely run out of things to say, resorting to frantic editing and loud sound effects to simulate a climax that never actually arrives. Sharman Joshi and Manoj Pahwa share a brief scene near the end that almost works, driven by a quiet exhaustion that feels miles away from the manic cartoon energy of the rest of the production, but it is swallowed up by the frantic noise of the finale before it can register as anything more than a fleeting missed opportunity. It is a picture that tries very hard to be relevant without ever doing the hard work of building a coherent world for its characters to inhabit, leaving behind a mess of half-baked gags and good intentions that simply evaporate the moment the screen goes black.