Saif Ali Khan keeps rolling his eyes in ways that suggest he’d rather be reading a script printed on actual parchment instead of interacting with a tennis ball on a green stick. It is a small thing that bugged me from his very first entrance, this recurring habit of looking past his scene partners like he’s trying to spot the craft services truck through four hundred layers of digital ash. You can trace this particular exhaustion back to how much of Adipurush feels less like a motion picture and more like a lengthy litigation over intellectual property rights. The whole enterprise sits there on the screen, heavy and gray, humming with the unmistakable energy of a studio meeting that went on for six months past the point where anyone cared about the result.

Om Raut directs everything as if the audience is sitting twenty rows back in an unairconditioned single-screen theater in Indore, needing every gesture exaggerated until the wrists practically pop out of their sockets. The camera rarely just watches people talk; it swoops and dips around them like an irritated gnat that won't die, treating a simple conversation between brothers about footwear or exile as an occasion for a sweeping crane shot. There is no middle distance in this movie, no quiet corner where two characters can exist without being surrounded by a hundred computer-generated monkeys who look like they were rendered on a laptop from 2012 that’s running on fumes. The screenplay lurches from one iconic mythological set-piece to the next with the breathless panic of a student who forgot to read the assignment and is trying to wing an oral presentation by shouting buzzwords at the teacher.

Prabhas plays Raghav with a kind of monumental stiffness that makes his earlier work in Baahubali look like a masterclass in loose-limbed naturalism, though if I'm honest, the poor man spends most of his screen time just standing in an empty warehouse waiting for somebody to tell him where the sky monster is supposed to be. His armor has so many overlapping metallic plates that he walks like he’s wearing a refrigerator strapped to his back, which certainly keeps him from moving too fast during the action beats. Kriti Sanon tries her level best to inject some actual warmth into Janaki, bringing a quiet dignity to scenes where she has to emote at a pile of rocks that were obviously slotted in during post-production. Then you have Sunny Singh as Lakshman, whose main contribution to the dramatic momentum is to look deeply concerned while holding a bow that appears to weigh roughly four hundred pounds, occasionally grunting in a way that suggests he’s lifting furniture.

The lighting scheme appears to have been entirely outsourced to a weather app that only recognizes the word haze, washing out every sunset and turning Ayodhya into a place that looks perpetually coated in fine volcanic dust. It is a strange choice for material that traditionally relies on vibrant reds, golds, and deep blues to convey divine presence, opting instead for a muddy brown palette that makes every costume look like it was dragged through a damp basement before being put on the rack. The musical score by Ajay-Atul does not help matters, crashing in with choir vocals and heavy brass at moments when two people are just looking out a window, refusing to let a single emotion breathe without being shoved under a steamroller of strings. You hear the same five-note brass motif so many times during the second hour that your teeth begin to ache in time with the timpani.

Somewhere underneath all those terabytes of gray CGI lies the Ramayana, an epic that has survived millennia of retellings, stage plays, and television adaptations only to be flattened into a video game cinematic cutscene that nobody bothered to play-test. The philosophical questions about duty, temptation, and righteousness are brushed aside in favor of endless fistfights where glowing projectiles bounce off armor like sparks from a grinder in a small-town auto repair shop. It treats its audience with a strange kind of condescension, assuming that reverence can be bought wholesale by making everyone look like an action figure that was left too close to a radiator. Hindi films have certainly tackled massive mythologies before without turning them into airless cartoons, but this one seems genuinely frightened of stillness, filling every frame with floating debris, glowing embers, and armies of identical demons that march left and right across the horizon until your eyes cross.

By the time the demon king’s ten heads start bickering among themselves like disgruntled board members at a failing regional bank, you realize the movie has completely lost the plot in pursuit of sheer digital volume. Saif Ali Khan tries to give Lankesh some theatrical bite with a booming delivery, but his lines are often dubbed so out of sync with his jaw movements that he looks like he’s voicing a foreign-language cartoon found on a streaming service at three in the morning. It is not great, not bad, just there, taking up space on a hard drive somewhere while everyone involved moves on to other projects. Bollywood movies have occasionally stumbled into this kind of expensive corporate vacuum before, but rarely with such an earnest, joyless insistence that we ought to be impressed by the sheer scale of the waste.

The sound design deserves its own special mention for the way every single punch sounds like someone dropping a frozen turkey onto a tile floor, a Foley choice that gets funnier the longer the movie goes on. When Raghav shoots an arrow, the resulting sonic boom could rattle the windows of a suburban dental office, even if he is just aiming at a mildly annoyed goblin who is standing ten feet away from him. That kind of over-engineering runs through the entire production, screaming for your attention while simultaneously making you want to check your watch to see how much of the runtime is left.

There is an extended sequence in the middle involving a flying mountain that looks so weightless and fake that you half-expect a Windows 95 screensaver to pop up in the corner of the frame to remind you of simpler times. It is hard to stay invested in the fate of the universe when the universe itself appears to be made of wet cardboard and gray pixels that smear every time the camera pans too fast. The supporting players come and go without leaving much of a mark, mostly because they are required to shout all of their dialogue over a relentless wall of orchestral thunder that never lets up for even ten seconds.

Devdutta Nage plays Hanuman with an upright solemnity that almost works, despite the digital fur looking less like monkey hair and more like a poorly rendered carpet remnant from an old hotel corridor. He spends a lot of time kneeling and looking devotional, which matches the general tone of the production, a film that seems terrified of its own source material and kneels before it with such crushing, dead-eyed reverence that all the life gets squeezed right out of the room. It never breathes, it never pauses, it just grinds forward through the plot like a bulldozer through a retirement village garden. You leave the theater with a headache and a lingering sense that nobody on screen was having any fun at all.