Genius
Synopsis:
Look, let's back up because Genius is one of those wild Hindi films that just drops you into absolute madness and expects you to keep up with the physics-defying stunts. Utkarsh plays Vasudev Shastri, who isn't your average guy, because he's an orphan genius who loves reciting the Bhagavad Gita while solving insanely complex equations on a chalkboard like he's trying to impress an entire lecture hall of very confused professors.
And then bang, he meets Nandini Chauhan, played by Ishita Chauhan, who somehow falls in love with him despite him constantly talking in riddles and acting like an absolute weirdo on a college campus where nobody else seems to be doing actual schoolwork. They have this whole romance arc that moves at lightning speed, and honestly, the background extra in the third row of the library scene is wearing this neon green striped sweater that is so painfully ugly it literally distracted me from the entire romantic dialogue.
Vasudev joins RAW because he's a patriotic mastermind who can hack anything with three keystrokes, and he gets assigned to track down this slippery international villain named MRS played by Mithun Chakraborty who has this terrifying gravelly voice and hangs out in shadowy lairs plotting the destruction of India just for fun. Mithun da is chewing the scenery so hard it's amazing, wearing tinted sunglasses indoors and barking orders at henchmen who exist purely to get drop-kicked into glass tables by Utkarsh.
Right when things are getting genuinely tense and Vasudev is closing in on MRS, boom, the director decides it's time for a completely random romantic song and dance number where they're suddenly frolicking in snow-capped mountains or colorful streets out of nowhere. Bollywood movies love doing this tonal whiplash, and you're just sitting there blinking while the characters trade their tactical gear for bright silk jackets for four minutes before immediately going back to international terrorism.
Stuff happens so fast that you blink and suddenly Vasudev gets ambushed, betrayed by corrupt higher-ups, shot multiple times, and left for dead in a massive explosion that is supposed to write him out of the story forever. But wait, he doesn't die because he's the hero of the movie, and he comes back later with a shaved head and a dark backstory revenge plot that turns this whole mess into a classic action revenge thriller.
We hit the interval point right after an insane car chase where Utkarsh jumps a moving vehicle onto the roof of a shipping container, and trust me, the intermission card couldn't have come faster because my brain was melting from the sheer volume of CGI explosions and slow-motion punches.
The second half is just non-stop cat-and-mouse games between Vasudev and MRS, where everybody is double-crossing everybody else, and Nandini gets caught in the middle crying tears of absolute confusion while guns are pointed at her face from every possible angle. Vasudev uses his old college physics tricks to disable a massive high-tech terror network using a customized laptop that apparently connects to every satellite in the northern hemisphere.
And then we reach the climax on that exact bridge from the very beginning of the film where Utkarsh is bleeding from his forehead, shouting patriotic slogans directly into the face of Mithun Chakraborty while local cops just watch from fifty feet away without doing anything to help. Vasudev overpowers MRS in a brutal hand-to-hand combat sequence that ends with the villain getting zip-tied and handed over to the authorities while the national flag flutters majestically in the background breeze.
There is a specific kind of squint an actor has to pull off when they are supposed to be looking at a holographic projection of advanced military intelligence that was clearly added in post with software that cost less than a used hatchback. Utkarsh Sharma spends a remarkable portion of Genius squinting like that, staring past the lens with a look of fierce, unearned concentration that suggests he is either deciphering the launch codes for a nuclear ICBM or just trying to remember if he left the gas stove on back at the university dorm.
Director Anil Sharma wants this thing to feel like Border or Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, but the budget has the distinct scent of a producer who spent forty percent of the cash on the catering truck and the rest on red smoke canisters. You get these long, sweeping drone shots of Mathura that look like they were pulled straight from an uncredited YouTube travel vlog, complete with the stuttery frame-rate drops when the gimbal gets hit by a gust of wind. The screenplay treats logic the way a tired dog treats a bath, dodging it at every corner while the supporting cast runs around shouting lines about patriotism and the sanctity of the motherland into microphones that pick up too much room reverb. It’s loud, clumsy, and aggressively earnest in a way that makes you want to check your watch just to see how many hours of your life are left.
Ishita Chauhan plays the love interest with the kind of permanent, glossy-eyed perplexity that usually implies the director just told her to stand near the hero and look like she's listening to a very long podcast about cryptocurrency. She has almost nothing to do except exist as a prize to be won, lost, and then won back via an algorithm that dates back to the black-and-white era of Hindi films. Then you have Mithun Chakraborty chewing through the scenery like he wandered onto the wrong soundstage and decided to stay for the free tea, wearing a beret and delivering his exposition with a raspy theatrical authority that towers over everyone else in the frame simply by virtue of being loud enough to wake the sound recordist.
And honestly, it’s a small thing, but the foley artist's obsession with adding a heavy, wet leather-slapping sound every time someone throws a punch drove me up the wall by the end of the first reel. You see a light tap to the jaw and the audio track delivers a bone-shattering crunch that belongs in a totally different movie, something closer to The Raid than a domestic campus romance-turned-spy thriller. The soundtrack keeps dropping these synth-heavy orchestral stings whenever Sharma narrows his eyes at a blackboard full of equations, trying desperately to manufacture the kind of pulse-pounding tension you used to get in Ghajini, but without any of the directorial discipline or visual grit to back it up.
The themes here are about as subtle as a brick through a stained-glass window, hammering away at the concept that an ordinary student from a small town can outsmart both the Indian intelligence apparatus and foreign mercenaries with nothing more than a protractor and an unstoppable desire to defend the flag. Characters talk entirely in slogans, trading dialogue that sounds like it was scraped off the back of a bumper sticker on a Delhi auto-rickshaw. It’s the sort of mid-tier commercial cinema that relies on the audience’s exhaustion to get away with its narrative shortcuts, hoping you'll be too tired to notice that the villain's master plan relies entirely on the protagonist forgetting how doors work.
By the time the third act kicks into gear with its endless helicopter chases and warehouses full of blinking red LEDs, the movie has completely shed any remaining pretense of being about real people. It becomes a blur of slow-motion leaps and terrible CGI explosions that bloom orange and black against a green-screen sky that looks like it was rendered on an office PC from 2008. Bollywood movies have certainly delivered grander spectacles on smaller checks before, but usually, there's a charismatic lead or a killer tune to distract you from the duct tape holding the plot together. Here, you just get a lot of yelling, a lot of squinting, and a final twenty minutes that feels less like a narrative resolution and more like a punishment for staying in your seat past the interval.