There is a specific kind of yellow light that digital colorists rely on when they want you to feel the dust of late-nineteenth-century Bombay, and Vibhu Puri drenches almost every corner of Hawaizaada in it until the screen looks like a nicotine-stained ceiling. It gets old fast. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes feel less like an unfolding narrative and more like an endurance test through a heavily filtered Instagram gallery where every single extra is wearing a meticulously distressed waistcoat that never saw a drop of actual sweat. This is supposed to be the world of Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, a man history barely remembers and folklore has inflated into a titan of aviation, though the screenplay treats historical documentation with the casual indifference of a teenager fabricating a book report on the morning it is due. Ayushmann Khurrana plays this loose interpretation of a visionary with a wide-eyed earnestness that sometimes saves the material and sometimes just makes you acutely aware of how thin the dialogue actually is. He spends a lot of time staring into the middle distance with his mouth slightly open, capturing that specific look of a guy who has just realized he left the gas stove on back home. It is an exhausting movie to sit through because it refuses to trust its own silence, constantly layering over minor character moments with a background score that swells like an opera singer trapped in a broom closet. You can trace the budget constraints in the crowd scenes where the same three people run past the camera from slightly different angles, trying desperately to look like a mob of outraged citizens in British-ruled India.

Khurrana has charm to spare, and he needs every ounce of it to drag this plodding biographical fantasy across the finish line without looking like a fool. He handles the physical comedy of the early scenes with a loose-limbed dexterity that recalls his work in Vicky Donor, darting through narrow gullies and dodging angry landlords with genuine comic timing. Yet whenever the tone shifts from lighthearted caper to soaring nationalistic inspiration, his performance gets stuck in a gear that only grinds. Mithun Chakraborty wanders in as Pandit Subbaraya Shastry, the mentor figure who speaks almost exclusively in riddles and metaphors about birds, and he manages to steal every scene simply by refusing to exert any real effort. He plays the eccentric guru with a gravelly nonchalance, dropping his lines as if he is half-asleep and entirely unbothered by the heavy-handedness of the surrounding drama. Pallavi Sharda plays the love interest, a courtesan with a heart of gold and a wardrobe that costs more than the entire village set combined, and she is given precious little to do other than look concerned near doorways and deliver soulful gazes into the torchlight. The chemistry between Khurrana and Sharda feels entirely manufactured in a boardroom, devoid of any friction or surprise, sputtering along on the sheer inertia of traditional romantic tropes found in standard Bollywood formulas. Whenever they share a quiet moment, the editing cuts away a fraction of a second too soon, ruining whatever tiny bit of intimacy they might have accidentally conjured up.

The visual effects are rough around the edges, occasionally resembling a cutscene from a mid-tier video game released during the early days of the PlayStation 3. When Talpade finally stands in front of his wooden contraption, the camera circles him with such breathless reverence that you almost forget how derivative the entire aesthetic is. There are moments here that borrow heavily from the visual playbook of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, particularly Saawariya, but without that director's obsessive control over texture and shadow. The sets look like sets. The painted backdrops of the Bombay skyline have a flatness that constantly reminds you of the soundstage limitations. Yet there is a strange, stubborn sincerity buried beneath the artifice of these Hindi films that prevents the whole enterprise from collapsing into total cynicism. Puri really seems to believe in the myth he is constructing, pushing past the glaring historical inaccuracies and the clumsy plotting with a relentless enthusiasm that occasionally produces a striking image. A shot of a bamboo frame catching the morning sun against a hazy sky almost justifies the preceding hour of muddled exposition. Almost. But then the film immediately cuts back to a terrible green-screen sequence involving flying pigeons that looks like it was rendered by an intern on a lunch break.

Naman Jain pops up as the younger sidekick, bringing a jolt of necessary energy whenever the pacing threatens to grind to a complete halt, though his character exists purely to ask leading questions that allow Khurrana to explain his engineering theories out loud. It is a classic dramatic crutch, used repeatedly to bridge the massive gaps in a screenplay that seems unsure of whether it wants to be a whimsical romance, a political rebellion, or a straightforward inventor's journey. The soundtrack by Vishal Bhardwaj and others tries hard to elevate the proceedings, but the songs are placed with such clumsy timing that they actively disrupt the narrative momentum instead of enhancing it. A romantic ballad drops right in the middle of a tense confrontation with the colonial authorities, draining all the urgency from a scene that desperately needed to breathe. This kind of tonal whiplash plagues many contemporary Hindi movies, which often prioritize the delivery of individual music video moments over structural coherence. You sit there watching a genuinely talented cast flounder slightly under the weight of an overly ambitious concept that nobody quite knew how to execute on a modest budget. The pacing is consistently uneven, racing through years of scientific trial and error in a single montage before spending twenty agonizing minutes on a redundant subplot involving a corrupt local official who poses zero actual threat to our hero.

By the time the flying machine finally stumbles into the air, the emotional stakes have been so thoroughly diluted by repetitive sequences and jarring editorial choices that the grand finale feels curiously hollow. It is not a complete disaster, because the sheer oddity of the premise keeps you watching long after the logic of the narrative has fallen apart, but it is certainly a missed opportunity of significant proportions. Puri had a compelling, weird corner of history to explore, yet he chose to coat it in the most generic gloss available, smoothing away all the rough edges until nothing distinctive remained. You are left thinking about what this material might have looked like in the hands of a filmmaker less beholden to conventional cinematic formulas and more interested in the messy, unglamorous reality of invention. Instead, we get a polished, forgettable fable that plays like a prolonged advertisement for an imaginary museum exhibit, leaving you with little more than a mild headache and the lingering taste of artificial sweetener.