Aditya Roy Kapur’s collarbones deserve a separate credit in Rashtra Kavach - OM. He spends roughly seventy percent of the runtime shirtless, greased up, and launching himself through glass partitions with the grim determination of a man who just realized he left his oven on back at the safehouse. If I'm honest, the physical transformation is staggering and looks like it required twelve personal trainers and a daily diet of raw chicken breast, but it also turns the movie into a two-hour anatomy lesson where plot details are secondary to whatever vein is currently bulging on his neck. You can practically hear the personal trainer cheering from just outside the camera frame whenever he sustains a flying kick.

Director Kapil Verma directs action sequences like he has a flight to catch at midnight and needs to wrap up the explosions before security gates close. The screenplay by Akshat Ajay Sharma and Niket Pandey hurls clichés at the wall with a shotgun blast, hoping something patriotic and loud will stick to the drywall. We get rogue scientists, stolen nuclear codes, a missing father who was supposedly a traitor, and an organization with a name that sounds like an insurance firm specializing in high-risk floods. Characters speak exclusively in clipped military jargon or heavy emotional exposition delivered while staring at satellite feeds on glowing blue monitors. It is a loud, messy contraption of a film that refuses to let a single silence breathe for longer than two seconds.

Sanjana Sanghi tries her best with a character written mostly as a collection of tactical vests and furrowed brows. She is supposed to be a hardened special agent, yet she spends a lot of time looking genuinely confused about whether she remembered to lock her front door before reporting for duty. The supporting cast features actors like Prakash Raj and Jackie Shroff doing that weary-eyed veteran routine they could probably phone in from a Marriott in Bandra while eating room-service toast. Armen Grayg pops up as the obligatory foreign heavy with an accent so thick you could carve it with a butter knife, and every single one of his line readings feels dubbed by someone standing three feet away from the microphone in an echoey studio. It's a small thing that bugged me, but the sound mixing on the punches sounds less like bone-crushing impact and more like someone dropping a heavy encyclopedia onto a wooden floor.

Cinematographer Rajeev Srivastava bathes every frame in a desaturated blue-and-orange filter that makes modern Bollywood action look like it was color-graded inside a video game about global terrorism from 2011. The camera never stays still for more than a single heartbeat, zooming and panning and shaking even during quiet conversations between two people sitting on a park bench. It feels like John Wick viewed through the bottom of a cheap whiskey tumbler, though without the kinetic grace or the precise choreography that made Keanu Reeves' stunts sing. The background score by Chirantan Bhatt and Amartya Bobo Rahut arrives with the subtlety of a freight train barreling through a suburban living room, hammering home every punch and every lingering stare with thumping percussion that quickly becomes background noise.

There is an exhausting sincerity to the way hindi films keep trying to invent their own Jason Bourne without understanding that Jason Bourne usually looked tired and worried rather than deeply concerned about his lighting. Aditya Roy Kapur plays OM with a straight face that commands respect even when the material collapses entirely around him, especially during a mid-film flashback sequence involving a burning car and a tearful salute that belongs in an entirely different, much worse movie. He commits to the stunt work with bruises that look real and ribs that must have hurt for weeks after wrap. Yet the patriotic themes feel tacked on like cheap bumper stickers, trotted out whenever the script needs an excuse to justify another five minutes of men shooting submachine guns at each other in a dimly lit warehouse.

Hindi movies have a long history of blending family melodrama with espionage, but Rashtra Kavach - OM forgets the melodrama needs to be somewhat engaging for the espionage to matter. We jump from location to location with zero sense of geographical continuity, moving from fictional Eastern European badlands to underground bunkers in Delhi faster than you can say territorial sovereignty. The editing cuts away from dramatic confrontations right before they get interesting, robbing the narrative of any lingering tension. By the time the third act rolls around with its predictable double-crosses and slow-motion walk away from an immense fireball, the fatigue sets in deep and hard.

It is not the worst action thriller ever exported from Mumbai, but it lacks the joyful absurdity of Pathaan or the gritty efficiency of something like Baby, floating instead in a murky middle ground of forgotten streaming fodder. You watch Kapur throw himself through yet another wooden door and wonder if anyone on set whispered that maybe the take was fine before they did it three more times from different angles. He works harder than the script deserves, sweating through every scene while the plot dissolves around him into a soup of generic espionage tropes and recycled dialogue. That kind of unrewarded effort lingers in the mind long after the closing credits fade to black and the television goes dark.