There is a specific kind of low-budget thriller sound design where every single punch sounds like a wet bag of groceries being dropped onto linoleum, and Shortcut Romeo leans into that acoustic choice with an almost touching stubbornness. If I'm honest, the whole thing starts off on the wrong foot before the copyright notice has even finished scrolling, throwing us straight into a murky digital aesthetic that makes the entire screen look like it was smeared with a very thin layer of mustard-colored petroleum jelly. Suseelan Kumar is remaking his own Tamil hit here, hauling the mechanics of blackmail and desperate social climbing up into the glossy, perpetually neon-dusted upper crust of Mumbai, but the translation smells faintly of photocopy toner that has run slightly out of alignment. We watch Neil Nitin Mukesh pace across penthouse floors that probably cost more than my first two cars combined, muttering dialogue about money and power with the kind of intense, squinting detachment you usually see from someone trying to remember if they turned the oven off before leaving for the airport.

Neil plays Suraj, a fitness freak who stumbles into blackmail almost by accident after filming an older woman having an illicit rendezvous in a park, which leads directly to his recruitment by Ameesha Patel's Monica as a kept man with a very specific, high-end list of extracurricular duties. The screenplay lurches forward in fits and starts, abandoning narrative logic whenever it gets too inconvenient, preferring instead to linger on extended montages of currency changing hands in shadowy underground parking lots that look suspiciously like every other underground parking lot built in the western suburbs since 2004. You can practically feel the editing decisions happening in real-time, especially in the dialogue sequences where reaction shots are held for roughly two full seconds longer than human social norms require, creating a dead-eyed sort of rhythm that sucks all the oxygen out of the room. Puja Gupta shows up later as the nominal love interest who exists mostly to provide a moral counterweight to the sleaze, though her character arc is written with such breezy indifference that she essentially has to mime being shocked whenever the plot takes a sharp left turn into kidnapping and extortion. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often characters walk into completely empty rooms and immediately begin speaking at conversational volume without checking to see who might be standing right behind them.

Ameesha Patel delivers a performance that feels less like acting and more like she is remembering instructions given to her over a very bad phone connection, projecting an unyielding, high-gloss coldness that works surprisingly well for the first twenty minutes before completely flattening out under the weight of the second-act twists. She has this habit of narrowing her eyes while delivering threats that suggests she is trying to solve a very difficult long-division problem in her head, which gives her scenes an unintentional comedic friction that outlasts whatever tension the director is trying to build with the generic synth drones playing on the soundtrack. Neil Nitin Mukesh does the heavy lifting with his jawline, chewing through Hindi films' traditional obsession with the ambitious poor boy who wants to ride in foreign cars, though he lacks the dangerous, feral charm that someone like Vivek Oberoi brought to Company a decade earlier. He plays everything at the exact same temperature, whether he is staring longingly at a stack of cash or listening to someone confess a deep psychological trauma, which creates a strange vacuum where emotional stakes are supposed to live.

The cinematography relies heavily on wide-angle lenses that distort the edges of the frame just enough to make you feel like you are watching through a slightly warped security camera, though the lighting department seems to have bought out an entire hardware store's supply of blue and orange gels and decided to use them both simultaneously in every single indoor scene. Songs appear with the aggressive randomness of pop-up ads on an unsecured streaming site, dragging the narrative momentum to a complete halt so the leads can gyrate against various expensive pillars while wearing outfits that cost more than my entire wardrobe. The audio mixing during these musical breaks is particularly egregious, featuring vocal tracks that float completely untethered from the physical spaces the actors are supposedly inhabiting, sounding as though they were recorded in a padded closet three months after the cameras stopped rolling. It contributes to that distinct flavor of Hindi cinema where the technical elements operate in separate zip codes, refusing to acknowledge one another's existence even when they are sharing the exact same frame.

Beneath the tacky surface and the endless parade of product placement for luxury brands that no normal person in the audience can afford, the film wants to say something moderately biting about the transactional nature of modern desire, but it lacks the narrative discipline to follow through on any of its darker impulses. Every time the story threatens to get genuinely unpleasant or morally grey, the writers introduce a wildly implausible plot convenience that lets everyone off the hook, reducing what could have been a nasty little neo-noir experiment into standard-issue masala fluff with a higher than average body count. It is difficult to care much about the fate of people who spend ninety percent of their screen time plotting against each other in sterile, air-conditioned isolation, and the movie never finds a way to make their greed feel cinematic rather than merely tedious. We are left watching a collection of expensive-looking props bounce off each other in the dark, hoping against hope that someone might say something genuinely surprising or interesting before the credits finally roll.

By the time the climax arrives on a rain-slicked rooftop that has clearly been soaked by a municipal fire hose, the emotional investment has long since drained away into the gutters of Andheri, leaving behind only the hollow clatter of genre tropes being mechanically reassembled for the thousandth time. There is no grand statement here, no hidden brilliance waiting to be excavated by future historians of commercial Bollywood, just a mildly exhausting two-hour exercise in style-over-substance that forgets to actually be stylish about half the time. You can watch it for the sheer accidental humor of its more ambitious leaps in logic, or you can skip it entirely and spend the evening staring at a blank wall, which will provide roughly the same level of narrative engagement without the headache.