Sanjay Kapoor wears a shade of lipstick in the second half of Auzaar that I cannot stop thinking about, and frankly, it is a weird place to begin a conversation about a supposed action thriller. Let's just say it sits somewhere between bruised plum and desperate attempt at dramatic edge, distracting you from whatever dialogue is tumbling out of his mouth during a pivotal confrontation.

Director Sohail Khan stepped behind the camera here for his debut, bringing with him that specific late-nineties aesthetic where every interior looked like an empty hotel lobby rented for the weekend, complete with blue lighting gels slapped onto every window to simulate moonlight regardless of the time of day. The screenplay stumbles forward on the kind of logic only prevalent in certain hindi films of that decade, where police officers operate with absolute impunity and childhood friends turn into international arms dealers because of a stray misunderstanding over property values or family honor. You get chase sequences through abandoned docks that seem to stretch across three different postal codes, edited with a kinetic energy that mostly just causes mild nausea rather than actual suspense.

Salman Khan enters the frame wearing a leather vest that cost more than my first car, playing an honest-to-goodness CBI officer who apparently solves crimes entirely by staring intensely into the middle distance while leaning against expensive sports cars. His performance requires very little heavy lifting beyond looking mildly betrayed whenever Sanjay Kapoor's character makes another terrible life choice regarding illegal weaponry. It is not a stretch to call it phoning it in, except that Salman occasionally flashes that signature lopsided grin that somehow still worked in ninety-seven before it became a heavily patented trademark. He shares several scenes with Shilpa Shetty, who spends a remarkable amount of runtime looking like she wandered onto the wrong set after getting lost on her way to shoot a completely different romantic comedy, though she handles the sudden tonal shifts into kidnapping and psychological torture with a baseline professionalism that keeps the ship afloat.

The soundtrack relies heavily on Anu Malik doing his usual frantic imitation of whatever was topping the Billboard charts that month, shoving electronic drum loops under traditional string arrangements until your ears ring. It's a small thing but it bugged me how the primary romantic ballad uses the exact same flute sample as a dozen other bollywood movies from that same fiscal year, refusing to give the audience a single original hook to hum on the drive home. Cinematographer Sameer Reddy frames everything in medium-close shots, perhaps to hide the fact that the supporting cast was clearly reacting to nothing more interesting than a piece of gaffers tape on the wall, though he occasionally finds a nice reflection in a polished chrome bumper.

We are supposed to buy into this grand narrative about brotherhood and the corrupting influence of wealth, but the thematic weight keeps getting crushed under the sheer absurdity of the plot mechanics. Think of how tightly wound a thriller like Gupt managed to keep its central mystery, and then look at the way Auzaar just kind of wanders away from its own clues for twenty minutes at a time to accommodate a comedy track involving a bumbling sidekick who contributes precisely zero to the progression of the narrative. The brotherly bond between Salman and Sanjay feels less like a tragedy of competing loyalties and more like two guys who forgot to check their call sheets and ended up sharing trailer space by accident.

By the time the climax arrives on a dusty wharf that has been used in fifty other action pictures, you stopped caring who is buying the rocket launchers. The sound design drops out entirely during the emotional beats, leaving only the sound of heavy breathing and distant waves, which only highlights how thin the dramatic stakes actually are. Sanjay delivers his final monologue with a vein bulging in his temple that looks genuinely painful, shouting about destiny and betrayal while the camera whips around him in a dizzying circular track. Nobody is changing the landscape of cinema here, and maybe asking for more than a passable time-pass distraction on a rainy Tuesday afternoon is missing the point of what these productions were ever meant to achieve anyway.