Saif Ali Khan holds a glass of scotch in a South African penthouse like he’s practicing to be slightly more wealthy than he already is, and if I'm honest, that’s about seventy percent of what makes Race work as a piece of glossy commercial junk food. Abbas-Mustan don’t direct films so much as they arrange expensive mannequins in front of very shiny surfaces while someone off-camera shakes a bag of money. It’s loud, it’s completely nonsensical, and it moves at a breathless pace that prevents you from noticing that the plot is made of wet cardboard and borrowed DVD covers of Deception. The brothers in crime here are Ranvir and Rajiv, one smart and brooding in tailored black suits, the other a whimpering drunk who exists purely to create liabilities that require elaborate set pieces to fix. We are in Durban half the time for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the story and everything to do with tax rebates and scenic helicopter shots over the coastline. The script is adapted from local and foreign thrillers with the kind of abandon that suggests copyright law is merely a polite suggestion, piling twist upon twist until the narrative folds in on itself like cheap origami. It’s a messy business.

Akshaye Khanna plays Rajiv, and he spends the first half of the runtime sweating through his collars while looking like a man who owes money to several very dangerous bookies, which effectively grounds the movie’s more cartoonish impulses. His line delivery has this nervous, twitchy cadence that reminds me of his work in Humraaz, where he also played a man constantly plotting against his own interests for the sake of a glamorous woman. Opposite him, Anil Kapoor steals every scene he blinks in by simply refusing to take the material seriously, playing a bumbling cop named Robert D’Costa who loves chilled wine and female attention much more than solving homicides. Kapoor wears sunglasses indoors, chews on toothpicks, and delivers exposition with the weary charm of a man who cashed his check before walking onto the set. The women, meanwhile, are deployed mostly as decorative obstacles. Bipasha Basu struts through the frame with predatory confidence, while Katrina Kaif shows up to look gorgeous in swimwear and remind us why silent film acting had some distinct advantages. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how the background score treats every single entrance by Katrina like she’s descending from Mount Olympus on a golden chariot, complete with heavy synthesizer stabs that belong in a late-nineties soap opera.

The cinematography by Ravi Yadav loves nothing more than a wide-angle lens pointed upward at a skyscraper while a character turns around dramatically in slow motion. Every surface gleams with digital grade, and the shadows are filled with a cool blue tint that makes the entire enterprise look like an extended commercial for high-end cologne. Then there is the soundtrack by Pritam, which hits you over the head with club tracks that were blasting out of every car stereo in Mumbai the year this thing dropped. The title track remains an absolute earworm despite its aggressively repetitive chorus, though watching characters break into synchronized choreography on a yacht in the middle of a murder plot creates a tonal whiplash that few directors outside of Hindi movies could survive. The editing cuts on almost every beat of the percussion, meaning you rarely get to look at an actor’s face for more than two seconds before the camera whip-pans to a spinning wheel or a falling champagne glass.

Beneath the glossy surface and the endless betrayals, the film operates on a cynical transactional logic where loyalty is a tradable commodity and insurance fraud is the highest form of romance. Nobody loves anybody here; they merely calculate return on investment. This makes the movie strangely exhausting over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime because emotional stakes keep resetting every fifteen minutes via double-crosses that are revealed through convenient flashback sequences. When Ranvir explains his grand scheme in the final reel, the convoluted logic collapses under the weight of its own plot holes, but you’re already too dizzy from the editing to care too much about the missing causality. It stands apart from standard Bollywood offerings mostly through its commitment to absolute surface gloss, trading traditional family melodrama for sleek neo-noir posturing that borrows heavily from Hollywood crime capers without ever grasping their internal mechanics.

You walk out of the theater feeling like you’ve just eaten an entire box of sugar cubes on an empty stomach. It is flashy, disposable, and entirely aware of its own absurdity, which saves it from becoming a total bore. Kapoor remains the best reason to watch any of it, drifting through the chaos with a raised eyebrow and a permanent smirk. The rest is just noise, expensive cars, and people falling off balconies into swimming pools.