Sidharth Malhotra's teeth look aggressively white during a covert desert surveillance scene where he is supposed to be hiding from thermal imaging, which is a small thing to fixate on perhaps, but the sheen of modern Bollywood gloss has a way of swallowing up whatever grit Neeraj Pandey’s script is trying to manufacture. Aiyaary tries very hard to be something sharp and complicated about military intelligence, corporate malfeasance, and the moral gray zones inhabited by men who wear uniforms while plotting against the systems that pay them, yet it keeps tripping over its own eagerness to explain the geopolitical weather to the audience. You can feel the sweat coming off the monitor in the editing suite. Pandey has made genuinely taut thrillers before, films where bureaucratic paranoia felt like a physical weight pressing down on the characters, but here the machinery clanks loudly enough to wake the dead. It is a dense, messy film that sprawls across multiple continents and data servers, moving from Kashmir to London with a breathless urgency that rarely stops to ask if we actually care about the USB drives being passed under park benches. The trouble is not that the story is too smart for the room, but rather that it spends half its runtime winking at us to make sure we know it knows how smart it is.

The narrative centers on an ideological split between a hardened colonel played by Manoj Bajpayee—or at least played with that specific brand of weary, cigarette-ash authority that Bajpayee brings to every government office—and his protégé, a hyper-competent major who decides to go rogue after stumbling upon a massive arms procurement scam. That protégé is Sidharth Malhotra, whose primary acting mode here involves staring intently into the middle distance while wearing dark sunglasses that reflect either a computer screen or a sunset, depending on the mood of the director of photography. If I'm honest, he doesn't do much with the internal conflict of a man betrayates his oath except look mildly inconvenienced by the traffic. He stands next to veterans like Naseeruddin Shah, who pops up as a retired intelligence asset living in London, and the contrast is stark enough to give you whiplash. Shah wanders through his scenes with a shambolic, lived-in eccentricity that suggests he found his own costume in a charity bin five minutes before rolling, chewing on dialogue that would sound wooden in the mouth of a novice. Anupam Kher also shows up as a beleaguered bureaucrat, barking orders into landline phones with the practiced exasperation of a man who has played this exact government functionary in forty other Hindi films over the last decade. They are all working from different instruction manuals. The veteran actors treat the material like a gritty procedural drawn from real-world headlines, while the younger cast acts as though they are posing for an outdoor gear catalog distributed at airport terminals.

There is a recurring musical cue that drops every time Malhotra's character contemplates his escape, a low synthetic hum that sounds like a refrigerator struggling in the middle of July, and it happens so often you start keeping count. It's a minor annoyance, sure, but it points to a broader lack of trust in the audience's attention span. The editing cuts away from reaction shots half a beat too soon, denying us the luxury of absorbing what a piece of bad news actually means to these people. Instead, we get rapid-fire montages of globetrotting transit, airplane wheels touching down on tarmac, and graphic overlays of satellite data that look remarkably like the UI of a mid-tier video game from 2012. You are constantly reminded that you are watching a movie funded by major studios who expect a certain quotient of nationalist chest-thumping mixed in with the corporate espionage, which results in tonal whiplash every time the film pivots from a quiet scene of domestic betrayal to a booming, brass-heavy anthem about protecting the motherland. It lacks the disciplined claustrophobia of Baby, which managed to make counter-terrorism feel like a grinding administrative chore rather than a superhero outing. Hindi cinema has this persistent itch to turn every intelligence officer into a brooding philosopher-king who quotes poetry before disabling a router, and Aiyaary scratches that itch until it bleeds.

The cinematography leans hard into a palette of bruised blues and sterile corporate grays, making even the sunny streets of London look like an interrogation room with better lighting. When the camera tracks characters through subterranean tunnels or sterile government corridors, the grain of the digital capture feels flat and airless, lacking the tactile punch that makes celluloid espionage feel dangerous. We are meant to ponder the ethics of surveillance in an age where data is the only currency that matters, but the script treats this theme like a bullet point on a slide deck rather than a lived reality for its characters. The whistleblowers and bureaucrats drone on about offshore accounts and shell companies with the weary precision of tax accountants, draining the room of any real dramatic friction. When the film tries to mount a tense sequence involving hacked servers and intercepted phone calls, it relies on actors frantically typing on laptops while numbers scroll past at impossible speeds, a cinematic cliché that stopped fooling anyone around the time of Swordfish. It’s an exhausting exercise in style over substance, where every frame is polished to a high sheen but nothing sticks to the ribs.

By the time the credits roll over another swelling, obligatory track about the eternal vigilance of the armed forces, you are left wondering what any of it was actually for. The narrative ties up its loose ends with a hurried clumsiness that feels like an executive order from a producer who realized the runtime was creeping past the two-and-a-half-hour mark. It is a movie that wants to be a complex web of deceit and double-crosses, yet it cannot resist the urge to spell out every single moral lesson in giant neon letters before the fade to black. The performances range from coasting to catatonic, the pacing drags in all the wrong places while sprinting through the moments that actually require patience, and the overarching political message gets lost in the general noise of explosions and exposition. You leave the theater feeling neither angry nor enlightened, just mildly annoyed at the wasted potential sitting in the margins of a script that had bigger ambitions than its budget or its star power could possibly support.