Suniel Shetty wears a leather jacket that cost more than my first car and probably smells like industrial glue. If I'm honest, that is the most striking image in the entire two and a half hours, a glistening piece of outerwear that defies the humid Mumbai alleys where half these street fights are supposed to be happening. The movie wants us to believe in an underground brotherhood of bruised egos and shirtless honor among the idle rich of Bandra, but it looks like a perfume commercial shot by someone who got fired from shooting toothpaste ads for being too lethargic. Director Vikram Bhatt had a specific vibe in mind, I assume, though half the time the lighting suggests a high-end furniture showroom after the store has locked its doors for the night. The screenplay behaves like a collection of scenes written on separate napkins and then assembled in the dark by a very tired production assistant who accidentally dropped three of them down the drain. You get six different guys with gelled hair and matching low-slung jeans staring intensely at each other across pool tables, talking about loyalty in the sort of dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a manga via Google Translate and then punched up by an exhausted copywriter. Sohail Khan walks through the frames with the expression of a man who left his stove on at home and cannot remember if he turned the gas off or just lowered the flame.

There is an audio mismatch in the third reel where Sohail’s voice drops about three decibels during a confrontation on a yacht, and it’s a small thing but it bugged me the whole afternoon. That kind of post-production sloppiness runs through the entire sonic landscape of the film, where the punches sound less like bone meeting flesh and more like someone dropping a thick dictionary onto a wet kitchen floor. The action choreography owes a massive debt to the messy, handheld geography of The Bourne Identity, except nobody on the stunt crew bothered to learn how to throw a convincing right hook. Zayed Khan tries to compensate for the lack of actual impact by snarling at the camera and flexing his forearms until his veins look like blue caterpillars crawling under a layer of baby oil. He plays the loose cannon of the group, which apparently means he has to wear sleeveless shirts even when visiting art galleries and occasionally kick a dustbin over to show he's troubled by his past. It is an exhausting performance that lacks any of the genuine unpredictability you used to get from Sanjay Dutt playing similar heavies back in the nineties. Riteish Deshmukh pops up occasionally to provide comic relief or look vaguely confused about why he is standing next to Dino Morea in a parking garage at midnight, and honestly his bewilderment is the only honest emotion captured on celluloid during those sequences.

Hindi movies of that particular decade were obsessed with the idea of male bonding through property damage and slow-motion exits from burning warehouses, and this project checks every single box without ever figuring out why the box needed to be checked in the first place. The women in the cast—Amrita Arora, Dia Mirza, Neha Dhupia—exist entirely to stand near expensive sports cars and look disappointed when their boyfriends come home smelling of cheap bourbon and exhaust fumes. They are given lines that function exclusively as plot hinges, turning up in hotel lobbies just long enough to demand explanations that the script never bothers to provide. Ashmit Patel plays the resident sleazeball with a thin mustache and a smirk that stays frozen on his face even during scenes where he is supposed to be terrified for his life. The cinematography by Pravin Bhatt relies heavily on digital filters that turn every sunset into an oversized tangerine smear across the horizon, washing out the natural texture of the locations until Goa looks like a generic screensaver from Windows XP. When the characters sit around discussing their grand philosophical manifesto about dismantling corrupt corporate networks, the sound design swells with synthesized choir music that belongs in a low-budget fantasy game from 2004. You can see the exact moment the actors stop listening to each other and start waiting for their cue to throw a punch or deliver a one-liner that sounds like it was workshopped by a focus group of teenagers in a suburban mall.

There is a scene near the middle where all five of the male leads walk toward the camera in slow motion while an electric guitar groans in the background, and it goes on for so long you start noticing the extras in the distance trying not to look directly at the lens. Bollywood cinema has produced plenty of slick, empty-headed actioners over the years that still managed to deliver a decent thrill on a Friday night, but this one feels terminally sluggish right up until the credits start rolling over a blooper reel that features the actors laughing about missed lines. Ashish Chaudhary gets thrown through a glass coffee table in one sequence, and the glass shatters with such uniform geometric perfection that you half expect to see barcode stickers on the fragments. Nobody involved in the production seems interested in the actual narrative mechanics of the revenge plot driving the second half, treating the story beats as mere inconveniences to be hurdled on the way to the next shirtless fight scene. Suniel Shetty anchors the chaos with a gravelly voice and a posture that suggests he would rather be anywhere else on earth, which gives his scenes a strange, accidental gravity missing from the younger actors. You leave the theater wondering why anyone thought this specific brand of glossy, aggressive emptiness needed to exist, and then you forget the title before you even reach the parking lot.