The audio mix on Shoaib Ibrahim’s combat boots during the opening reel of Battalion 609 sounds less like heavy leather hitting mud and more like someone dropped a sack of potatoes onto a linoleum kitchen floor. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he took a step across the screen. Hindi cinema has spent decades perfecting the art of the sonic gut-punch, building entire soundscapes out of genuine thunder and synthesized dread, yet here we are with Foley work that makes an infiltration sequence sound like someone rummaging through a Tupperware cabinet for a matching lid. You sit there in the dark waiting for the grandeur to kick in, or at least some basic acoustic competence, but the movie just keeps shuffling along in its fuzzy slippers.

Director Brijesh Batth clearly wanted something visceral, maybe a gritty battlefield diary ripped straight from the headlines, but the screenplay feels like it was assembled out of discarded draft pages found under a park bench. Plot points arrive unannounced, linger just long enough to make you wonder if you missed a reel change, and then vanish without paying rent. The narrative mechanics creak louder than a rusted gate, hauling our soldiers into ridiculous territory where military protocol goes out the window the second an officer opens his mouth to deliver a speech. It tries so hard to evoke the kinetic desperation of LOC Kargil, but it lacks the scale, the budget, and frankly the basic spatial awareness to make a firefight legible to the human eye. Characters stand out in the open yelling tactical updates while the enemy apparently forgot how to aim a rifle, which drains every ounce of suspense right out of the boots.

Vicky Ahuja does what he can with dialogue that smells of old cardboard and lukewarm tea, though his eyes mostly convey a quiet, terrifying realization that he has signed up for something that isn't quite working. He plays the seasoned veteran with a weary shrug that feels earned, mostly because he looks genuinely tired throughout, dragging himself through the muck while the camera stares blankly at the back of his helmet. Shoaib Ibrahim approaches the material with the kind of intense sincerity that usually belongs in a daily soap opera, hitting his dramatic marks with wide-eyed fervor and punching his consonants until they bruise. Shrikant Kamat pops up in a supporting role that deserved a much better actor, bringing a gravelly authority to scenes that otherwise would have dissolved entirely into background noise. None of them are bad, exactly, but they are stranded in a movie that treats acting as a mechanical chore rather than an act of discovery, moving them from point A to point B like chess pieces dropped by a clumsy toddler.

The cinematography looks like it was graded by someone who discovered the teal-and-orange slider on a cheap editing suite and decided to tape it down permanently. Every shadow is smeared with a digital sludge that eats up detail, turning uniforms into shapeless green blobs and faces into waxy lumps that refuse to catch the light properly. When the action heats up, the camera shakes with such violent, indiscriminate fury that you could be watching a dog fight or a grocery run and you wouldn't know the difference. The background score tries to paper over these visual gaps with swelling brass and synthetic choirs that swell up every time someone looks pensively at a photograph from home, telegraphing every emotional beat five minutes before it actually happens. You can practically hear the composer sweating over the Pro Tools timeline, desperately layering strings to convince you that something important is occurring when the frame is completely empty.

There is a strange, half-baked ideological undercurrent running through the story that tries to conflate cricket fandom with geopolitical posture, treating a sporting rivalry like an ancient blood feud that can only be settled with automatic weapons. It is the sort of simplistic chest-thumping that occasionally sneaks into Bollywood movies when nobody in the writers' room has the energy to think of an actual plot, substituting genuine conflict with a cheap flag-waving exercise. Yet the movie is too incompetent to even work properly as propaganda, fumbling its own talking points and muddying its own message until the soldiers on screen look less like heroes and more like extras who got lost on their way to a completely different set. Hindi movies have handled national pride with subtlety and grace on rare occasions, but this particular effort relies on the cinematic equivalent of a loud uncle shouting at the television during a tournament match.

By the time the credits finally roll, you are left wondering who this was actually made for, because it lacks the slick commercial sheen needed for a mainstream crowd and the raw artistic ambition required for anything resembling serious war drama. It sits in a strange, purgatorial middle ground of entertainment, failing to generate real excitement while refusing to be interesting enough to mock properly with friends. The editing in the final sequence cuts away from a crucial reaction shot just a fraction of a second too early, throwing off the rhythm of the entire climax and leaving the emotional payoff hanging in the dead air of the auditorium. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth, not because it offends your sensibilities or challenges your worldview, but because it simply wastes two hours of your afternoon on something that never should have left the rough-cut stage.