Anil Kapoor is wearing a red velvet jacket in twenty-eight-degree Goa heat, and if I'm honest, that tells you almost everything you need to know about the visual logic of Mohit Suri's Malang. It is a movie that refuses to sweat the small stuff because it is too busy worrying about the big stuff, like whether Aditya Roy Kapur's abs are catching enough golden hour light as he leaps off a cliff into the Arabian Sea. Hindi movies have long had a complicated relationship with logic, trading credibility for flash with a frequency that would give a traffic cop vertigo, but Suri leans into this impulse with an almost admirable lack of shame. You are supposed to look at the screen and feel things instantly without bothering to ask how anyone affords these beachside villas or why the local police department seems to operate entirely out of a neon-drenched nightclub.

Aditya Roy Kapur plays Advait, a man who looks at Goa the way a shark looks at a seal, though the script suggests he is actually just really sad about some stuff that happened involving Disha Patani. She plays Sara, a free-spirited backpacker who lives by a personal code that mostly involves running on beaches in slow motion and convincing strangers to do dangerous things for no money. Their romance unfolds through a series of sun-bleached montages that look like a five-year-old Instagram feed brought to life by someone with a massive corporate budget and a very particular aesthetic obsession. They ride quad bikes, they smoke things they probably shouldn't, they jump out of planes while smiling, and they talk about killing people with the casual nonchalance of tourists ordering a club sandwich by the pool. It is all terribly silly, and yet Kapur carries it with a weary, hollow-eyed commitment that almost makes you forget he spends forty percent of the film shirtless for no discernible narrative reason.

Then the plot kicks in, or at least the part of the plot that involves people shooting each other in broad daylight while bystanders casually sip coconut water. Anil Kapoor is Anjaney Agashe, a cop with zero respect for due process and a wardrobe that suggests he raided a boutique in Milan just before shooting began. He kills suspects in alleys, laughs maniacally at his own jokes, and generally behaves like a man who watched Dirty Harry once and decided the only problem with it was a lack of EDM. Kunal Kemmu shows up as another policeman, playing things with a straight-faced intensity that feels wildly out of place in a movie where people settle scores by having knife fights on top of moving party boats. The screenplay, credited to Aseem Arora and Anirudh Guha, jumps back and forth across a timeline with the erratic energy of a sugar-addicted toddler hitting buttons on a remote control, making sure you never quite know which flashback is supposed to make you care about these people.

There is a specific sound design choice that kept bugging me throughout the first half hour, where every single punch lands with the acoustic weight of a falling grand piano, even when the person being hit weighs about as much as a rolled-up magazine. It is a small thing, sure, but it repeats so often that you start waiting for the thud instead of watching the actual fight choreography, which is already a bit sloppy around the edges. The supporting actor who plays the main villain's primary henchman has been dubbed by someone who clearly recorded their lines in a tiled bathroom using an iPhone microphone from 2012, creating an echoing, detached vocal track that distracts from every single confrontation he is in.

Mohit Suri has made a career out of these moody melodramas, ever since releases like Aashiqui 2 established his signature visual language of rain-slicked streets and broken hearts, though Malang swaps the drizzle for coastal glare and trades acoustic guitars for thumping basslines. The cinematography by Vikas Sivaraman treats Goa like an endless music video, washing every frame in teal and orange until the natural landscape starts to look like a CGI render. It is glossy to a fault, refusing to let a single shadow exist without some kind of colored key light justifying its presence, which gives the whole enterprise a synthetic, frictionless sheen that keeps emotional engagement at arm's length.

Yet there is a weird, relentless momentum to the way the narrative barrels forward, refusing to pause for breath or character development once the initial exposition dump is out of the way. When the secrets finally start dropping, they arrive with the predictable thud of a soap opera plot twist, revealing motivations so paper-thin you could read a newspaper through them. Hindi films have often struggled to balance gritty revenge thrillers with the glossy aesthetics required for mainstream commercial success, usually ending up in a strange middle ground where nobody bleeds properly and everyone looks like they just stepped out of a salon.

Malang sits squarely in that tradition, offering up characters who exist only to look good while suffering immensely for reasons that dissolve under the slightest scrutiny. Kunal Kemmu gets a late-film monologue that tries to reframe his entire arc into something resembling a social critique about the nature of modern violence, but it lands with a wet thud because nothing that came before it earned that kind of thematic weight. You are left watching beautiful people inflict casual cruelty on each other against a backdrop of pristine tourist spots, wondering how long it would take to drive to the airport.

Aditya Roy Kapur does a fine job of looking haunted while holding a heavy-caliber firearm, and Disha Patani serves her primary narrative function of looking effortlessly cool while abandoning her responsibilities, but none of it stays with you once the screen goes black. It is the kind of cinematic experience that evaporates from your brain the moment the closing credits start to roll, leaving behind only vague memories of neon lights and wet hair. Bollywood movies have given us far better thrillers and far worse messes, and this one splits the difference by being just entertaining enough to sit through while you fold laundry, and just vacant enough to forget before the cycle finishes.