Tiger Shroff has spent the better part of a decade trying to convince us he is made of rubber and galvanized steel, and honestly, if I'm honest, Ganapath feels like the nadir of that entire physical enterprise. The movie starts with a tracking shot of his shoulder blades twitching under a sleeveless vest that looks perpetually damp, setting a tone of aggressive, uninterrupted sweatiness that never lets up for two and a half hours. It is a dystopian sci-fi actioner directed by Vikas Bahl, who apparently watched Mad Max: Fury Road once on an airplane with the cabin lights turned off and decided he could replicate the atmosphere using a grey color grading filter and a warehouse full of discarded scaffolding. The narrative is set in a fractured world split between a pristine, floating upper city and a filthy, subterranean slum where the poor eat what looks like grey porridge out of rusted tin cans while waiting for a messiah who goes by the single-syllable moniker of Ganapath. It is a setup so derivative of every graphic novel published in the late nineteen-nineties that you can practically smell the stale Mountain Dew and comic shop carpet.

Bahl directs the action sequences with the spatial awareness of a pinball machine. Punches land with a wet thud that sounds less like bone-breaking impact and more like a bag of wet laundry hitting a linoleum floor, repeated over and over until the noise loses all meaning. The screenplay, credited to Bahl and Sanjeev Tiwari, treats exposition like a personal insult to the audience's intelligence, opting instead for whispered monologues delivered against flickering neon signs that pulse with headache-inducing frequency. Characters enter rooms without doors and leave through walls that appear to be made of painted cardboard, which wouldn't matter so much if the camera didn't insist on lingering in tight close-ups that expose every stroke of cheap lacquer. There is a fight scene in the middle reel inside an abandoned train depot where the editing is so frantic that it is literally impossible to tell which limb belongs to whom, rendering the supposed heroism of the protagonist into a blur of grey fabric and CGI sparks. Rohit Bhujpal plays the primary antagonist with a sneer that requires him to bare his lower teeth for entire scenes, creating a facial twitch that is far more distracting than any of the dialogue he is given to deliver.

Kriti Sanon shows up about thirty minutes in as Jassi, wielding a pair of glowing metal batons and wearing leather trousers that squeak audibly every time she takes a stride. Sanon is an actor who can actually hold the screen when given a script that acknowledges her presence as a human being rather than a stunt double in waiting, but here she is reduced to spinning in mid-air and delivering lines about destiny with the enthusiasm of someone reading a grocery receipt. Her character exists to kick henchmen in the jaw and look concerned whenever Tiger Shroff flexes his pectorals, a dynamic that feels less like a partnership and more like a chaperone assigned to a very expensive piece of gym equipment. It is a performance that reminds you of her work in Mimi, where she played actual emotions with breath and timing, only to watch her get swallowed whole by the relentless machinery of a mid-tier Bollywood production that values silhouette over substance. The supporting cast features several actors who are clearly dubbed by people who have never met them in person, leading to lip-sync mismatches so severe they belong in a cartoon.

The cinematography relies almost exclusively on low-angle shots designed to make the leads look monumental, but because the backgrounds are entirely digital and rendered in shades of slate and rust, the effect is flat and weightless. You never feel the heat of the fire or the grit of the dust because everything has been polished to a dull digital sheen in post-production. The soundtrack is an assault of bass-heavy industrial tracks that kick in whenever anyone walks down a hallway with purpose, drowning out whatever sparse dialogue managed to survive the sound mixing stage. There is a recurring electronic motif that plays every single time a villain enters the frame, and after the fourth time it blared through the speakers, I started silently counting the seconds until it repeated again. Hindi films have a long and storied history of creating compelling dystopian worlds without needing a hundred million dollars of computer-generated rubble, yet this production looks smaller and more confined than a television commercial for floor wax.

Underneath the post-apocalyptic posturing, the film attempts to say something about income inequality and corporate greed, though its idea of political commentary is having a bad guy smoke a cigar while watching poor people throw punches in a mud pit. The rich live in a place called City One, which looks like an airport departure lounge designed by an architect who hates natural light, while the dispossessed toil in the shadows below. This rich-versus-poor binary is handled with the subtlety of a falling safe, complete with speeches about how the human spirit cannot be caged by electronic fences. It is the kind of hollow world-building that assumes if you paint enough rust onto a wall, the audience will forget there is no actual story happening behind it. Tiger Shroff runs through these tunnels with the exact same facial expression he used in Heropanti, proving that some actors treat character arcs as optional suggestions rather than requirements of the job. The thematic ambitions of the script collapse under the sheer weight of its own empty posturing, leaving behind only the sound of leather squeaking and metal poles clattering against concrete.

By the time the credits begin to crawl over a montage of outtakes that show the crew members looking just as bored as everyone else in the auditorium, you are left wondering who this movie was actually made for. It lacks the campy joy of classic masala entertainments and the technical precision of modern science fiction, sitting instead in that awkward middle ground where ambition outstrips capability by a margin of several miles. The editing choices in the final fifteen minutes are particularly baffling, cutting away from emotional reactions just as they register on the actors' faces in favor of wide shots of exploding barrels that don't cast any light on the surrounding actors. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened. Modern hindi movies deserve better than being treated as delivery systems for slow-motion punch reels and poorly rendered skylines. Ganapath isn't an interesting disaster or a misunderstood swing for the fences, and it certainly isn't worth the two hours and fifteen minutes it demands from your afternoon.