The sound mix on the opening motorcycle engine is just slightly out of sync with the visual cut, and if I am honest, that little stutter set my teeth on edge for the first ten minutes. Prakash Jha has never been accused of operating with a scalpel, which is fine, because subtlety is rarely what brings people out to multiplexes on a Friday night, though it occasionally leaves you wishing he would just trust the audience to connect two dots without hammering them into paste first. Here we are in the middle of red corridor territory again, a geopolitical hot zone that Hindi cinema keeps returning to with varying degrees of ideological indigestion. You watch Arjun Rampal strap on a flak jacket and look intensely concerned about state machinery, and you remember his work in Raajneeti, where he wore a similar expression of pained nobility while walking through dusty courtyards. This time he is Kabir, a senior police officer tasked with infiltrating the Naxalite stronghold alongside Abhay Deol’s remarkably shaggy-haired mole, Adil. Their chemistry works because they don't look like they belong in the same movie, let alone the same tactical unit, which gives their early scenes an actual friction missing from standard buddy-cop setups.

Abhay Deol plays Adil with a casual, almost slouching irreverence that keeps threatening to derail the heavy-handed socio-political lectures being handed out by every secondary character who wanders into frame. He is sitting on a rock smoking a beedi while Manoj Bajpai is delivering a blistering monologue about land grabs and corporate greed, and you find yourself watching Deol's left ear twitch just to see if he's actually listening to the script. Bajpai, meanwhile, eats every scene he touches as Rajan, the charismatic insurgent leader who quotes revolutionary poetry with the casual cruelty of a man who has forgotten what green grass looks like. It is a loud performance, certainly, but Bajpai has this terrifying way of dropping his voice to a low murmur just when you expect him to roar, forcing the entire theater to lean forward into the dark. Beside them, Esha Gupta struggles a bit with the sheer volume of exposition she has to deliver while looking sternly through aviator sunglasses, though she handles the action beats with a physical conviction that saves her from becoming just another plot device in camouflage.

The screenplay by Aniruddha Guha, Himanshu Kishan Mehra, and Jha himself operates like a series of blunt instruments swinging in the dark, hitting the same notes about corporate displacement and government apathy over and over until you feel slightly bruised around the temples. There's an extended sequence in a tribal village where the camera swoops around a campfire like a drunk drone, capturing drums and chanting with that breathless anthropological fetishism Bollywood movies resort to when they want to look serious about rural poverty. It's a small thing, but the extras in the background are chewing their portions with such aggressive enthusiasm that you can tell the catering truck must have just arrived behind the tree line. The action choreography deserves some credit for avoiding the slow-motion wire-fu nonsense that usually infects these productions, opting instead for muddy, desperate scuffles in the tall grass where nobody looks cool and everyone just looks terrified of getting hacked with a machete. Sachin-Jigar's score thumps away relentlessly, pushing every emotional beat until the strings feel like they are vibrating directly inside your skull, punctuated by Sameera Reddy showing up for an item number that feels less like a narrative interruption and more like a mandatory commercial break for the investors.

Kabir Bedi appears briefly as a shadowy bureaucrat who sits in air-conditioned rooms smoking cigars and discussing collateral damage, adding a nice touch of gravelly gravitas even if his character exists purely to give Rampal someone to yell at about constitutional rights over a landline. The ideological battleground the film tries to map is genuinely complicated, pitting tribal survival against state-sponsored resource extraction, but the narrative keeps short-circuiting its own arguments by reducing complex agrarian revolts into good-versus-evil fistfights in the mud. Deol's character arc shifts gears so fast in the third act that you half-expect him to check his watch and wonder if the shift is over yet, moving from cynical insider to bleeding-heart sympathizer with the narrative subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window. Yet there is a strange, stubborn momentum to the second hour that keeps you bolted to your seat despite the obvious plot holes and the dialogue that sounds like it was translated from an editorial in a national daily. It is a movie that wants to scream about social injustice while simultaneously delivering enough gunfights to keep the overseas distributors happy, resulting in a strange hybrid beast that can't quite decide if it wants to be an arthouse political tract or a standard-issue action thriller. When the dust finally settles and the credits start rolling over another pounding percussion track, you aren't left with any deep revelations about the Maoist insurgency, but you do remember the specific, tired look in Bajpai’s eyes when he realizes the game was rigged before he even picked up a rifle.