The CGI owl that flutters across the screen during the opening ten minutes of Ram Setu looks like it was rendered by a disgruntled intern who had a bus to catch, and if I am being totally honest, that cheap avian omen sets the exact ceiling for what follows over the next two hours and twenty minutes of screen time. Hindi movies have never quite figured out how to integrate digital fauna into live-action plates without making them look like floating stickers dropped into a moving background, but this particular bird takes a special kind of visual cheapness. It is a small thing, sure, but when a picture asks you to buy into a massive archaeological conspiracy involving ancient stones floating in the Indian Ocean, starting off with a PlayStation 2 bird tends to make you narrow your eyes right out of the gate.

Akshay Kumar plays Aryan Kulshrestha, an atheist archaeologist who loses his academic standing after getting framed by shadowy corporate forces who want to demolish the titular underwater bridge for a commercial shipping channel. He wears a permanent expression of mild annoyance, the kind you see on a guy waiting in line at a passport office when the printer jams. Abhishek Sharma directs this material with the frantic, sweat-stained energy of a man trying to defuse a bomb while reading the manual on a smartphone with a cracked screen. Scenes change locations with dizzying velocity, jumping from dusty university archives in Delhi to high-tech corporate boardrooms to deep-sea diving vessels without ever pausing to establish geography or mood. The screenplay lurches from one exposition dump to the next, treating logic like an inconvenient hurdle to be cleared as quickly as possible so we can get to the next set piece involving crumbling ruins or bad guys in black SUVs.

Beside Kumar, Jacqueline Fernandez plays an environmental scientist named Gabrielle who pops up whenever the plot needs someone to explain a geological term or hold a flashlight, while Nushrratt Bharuccha shows up in the periphery as Aryan’s worried wife, given precious little to do besides look concerned near a kitchen counter. Kumar delivers his lines with that familiar, slightly rushed cadence we have seen in half a dozen other contemporary Bollywood pictures where the star is clearly working on a compressed shooting schedule of forty days flat. He doesn't dig deep into the psychological toll of a disgraced scientist losing his life's work; he just puts on a leather jacket, runs through narrow alleyways, and squints at ancient inscriptions until someone hands him a torch.

The cinematography relies heavily on a muddy, desaturated color grade that tries desperately to pass off studio sets as real-world locations, drowning everything in a sickly greenish-yellow hue that makes the underwater sequences look like they were shot in an aquarium filled with pea soup. Whenever the characters travel to Sri Lanka, the film reaches for drone shots that have been compressed so aggressively by the digital projection that the palm trees smear across the screen like watercolor paintings left out in a rainstorm. The soundtrack by Vishal Mishra adds unnecessary orchestral swells to scenes of people simply looking at rocks, hammering home the dramatic weight of an artifact reveal with the subtlety of a brass band marching through a library.

There is a recurring obsession here with proving mythology through modern science, a thematic crutch that feels remarkably similar to the kind of pseudo-intellectual historical gymnastics we saw in Akshay Kumar's earlier outing Samrat Prithviraj, though at least this one skips the heavy armor and opts for scuba gear. The narrative spends an exhausting amount of time trying to validate religious faith by running it through carbon-dating machines and satellite imagery, as if ancient texts need a corporate stamp of approval from an archaeological board to matter. It wants to be an Indiana Jones adventure for the multiplex crowd, trading whip-cracking charm for aggressively earnest lectures about heritage and national pride while characters point flashlights at CGI maps.

What makes the whole enterprise genuinely tiring isn't the heavy-handed messaging or the wobbly visual effects, but the sheer mechanical exhaustion of the storytelling where every single plot point has to be spelled out twice just in case someone in the back row was checking their phone. Characters state their emotional states out loud with zero subtext, villains telegraph their evil intentions by standing under green lighting and sneering at interns, and the central mystery gets solved not through deduction or clever fieldwork, but because someone conveniently drops a journal containing a literal map to the exact plot point the heroes need next. By the time the third act rolls around with its rushed courtroom climax and its sweeping aerial shots of the disputed limestone shoals, the picture has completely run out of steam, leaving behind a hollow shell of an epic that feels less like a finished film and more like a rough cut that escaped from the editing bay before anyone had time to turn off the placeholder graphics.