That background painting of the Mumbai skyline in Govinda Waghmare’s office looks like it was rendered by an exhausted art student working on a forty-eight-hour deadline. It’s got that flat, grey smear of a sea that never actually looks like that in real life, and honestly, if I'm honest, it kept pulling my eyes away from whatever frantic nonsense Vicky Kaushal was doing with his eyebrows in the mid-ground. Shashank Khaitan has built an entire machine out of chaos, greasy backroom deals, disputed real estate, and very loud shirts, hurling his characters into situations that escalate from minor domestic fraud into full-blown homicide without ever pausing to catch a sensible breath. Bollywood movies have tried this specific frantic comedy-thriller crossover before, usually ending up with a tone that trips over its own shoelaces, but this one leans hard into the sweat and desperation of people who are permanently three installments behind on their car loans.

The screenplay moves with the frantic energy of someone running through a crowded station while carrying too many plastic bags, dropping plot points and picking up new complications before you've fully processed the last one. There’s a body in a trunk, or maybe it’s under a floorboard, or perhaps it’s just the constant threat of one that keeps everyone sweating through their polyester blend shirts in cramped living rooms that smell faintly of fried onions and stale talcum powder. It’s a lot to track, especially when the narrative swerves sharply into legal depositions and back-alley blackmail schemes that feel borrowed from a much cheaper 1990s thriller that used to play on afternoon television when nobody was watching. The editing occasionally lingers a beat too long on a reaction shot of Dayanand Shetty just staring blankly into the middle distance, which is funny the first two times but starts to feel like dead air by the fourth or fifth interrogation scene.

Vicky Kaushal plays Govinda with a desperate, whining pitch that feels completely miles away from the intense military commander he played in Uri, sliding into the skin of a put-upon junior dance choreographer who is trapped between a domineering wife and an opportunistic girlfriend with zero exit strategy. He sweats through every single scene, his eyes wide with a permanent expression of mild panic that suggests he has left the gas stove on at home while simultaneously running from five different loan sharks. He’s fun to watch because he looks entirely uncomfortable in his own skin, dragging his feet through dance routines that require him to look enthusiastic while his brain is clearly calculating how to pay for his mother’s medical bills without selling the family sofa. Beside him, Bhumi Pednekar chews through the scenery with a sharp, abrasive energy as the wife who has zero patience for his excuses, wearing loud prints and firing off insults with the casual cruelty of someone who stopped caring about three years ago.

Kiara Advani shows up as the glamorous girlfriend with her own agenda, gliding through the squalor of these cramped apartments in designer sunglasses that make no logistical sense for someone supposedly working as a backup dancer in a struggling dance troupe, but she sells the vanity well enough to make the dynamic work. Deependra Singh brings a gravelly, lived-in menace to his role as the local fixer who has seen too many shady property deals go sideways to get excited about another dead body. The soundtrack by a committee of composers relies heavily on brassy, percussion-heavy numbers that pop up every ten minutes like clockwork, and one specific club track repeats itself as background score so often that you begin to hear it humming in your teeth long after the scene has shifted to a dingy kitchen. The cinematography loves these hyper-saturated primary colors, splashing neon pinks and sickly greens across cramped interiors until the screen looks like a candy store that caught fire.

There's a recurring joke about a pet dog that gets stolen, found, lost again, and used as a bizarre bargaining chip in property disputes, and every time that poor animal appeared on screen, I found myself zoning out, wondering how much the trainer was paid to deal with the chaotic staging of these sequences. Hindi cinema has always had a complicated relationship with morality, frequently rewarding absolute scoundrels just because they happen to be the protagonist of the picture, and Govinda Waghmare fits neatly into that lineage of lovable rogues who lie, cheat, and steal without ever losing the audience's basic goodwill. He is not a good person, but he is surrounded by people who are considerably worse, which is the oldest trick in the book for making a coward look like an underdog you can root for during a messy climax involving a falling disco ball and an angry landlord.

There’s a strange middle-class anxiety humming beneath the bright lights and the comedic screaming matches, a constant preoccupation with clear titles, disputed land deeds, and the terrifying prospect of having to move further out into the suburbs where the local trains take twice as long to reach Churchgate. It mirrors the exact kind of frantic urban hustle that defines so many modern Hindi movies, where nobody ever seems to have a real job that doesn't involve some form of shady commission or illegal subletting. When the film tries to untangle its own convoluted web of lies during the final twenty minutes, it rushes past the emotional fallout with the speed of a commuter trying to squeeze through closing train doors, preferring another broad gag to any genuine reckoning between characters who have spent two hours lying to each other's faces.

If you stripped away the frantic editing and the colorful wardrobe, you'd find a rather standard farce that relies entirely on mistaken identities and closed-door misunderstandings, the kind of material that Govinda—the actual actor this protagonist is presumably named after—would have knocked out of the park back in his prime without breaking a sweat. Kaushal doesn't quite have that natural, rubber-faced physical comedy down to a science, but his sheer earnestness keeps the enterprise from completely collapsing under the weight of its own plot holes and overly complicated double-crosses. It’s messy, it’s loud, it overstays its welcome by at least fifteen minutes, and yet it moves fast enough that you don't have too much time to dwell on how little sense any of the character motivations make once the dust settles and the credits start rolling over a blooper reel.