Shahid Kapoor spends the first twenty minutes of Fida looking like he has just been shaken awake from a very specific kind of terrible dream involving a ledger that doesn't balance. His hair has that early-noughties college boy weight to it, feathered and falling across his forehead with a persistence that suggests a personal grievance against industrial gel, and his voice carries the slightly reedy quality of a young man who has yet to learn how to inhabit a room without apologizing for his height. He plays Jai, a man whose entire personality is basically just being very earnest about banking and very susceptible to women who wear oversized sunglasses indoors. When Neha arrives, played by Kareena Kapoor with the distinct energy of someone who has decided to treat every single line reading as an opportunity to look slightly bored by gravity itself, the movie shifts gears from a bland suburban romance into something far more frantic and considerably sweatier.

Ken Ghosh directs with the visual vocabulary of a man who watched a lot of MTV around 2002 and thought the primary lesson to be learned was that characters should never, under any circumstances, stand still in front of a neutral background. There is a blue tint applied to almost every night scene that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a municipal water utility bill that went unpaid. The screenplay, credited to Shrabani Deodhar, has this weird habit of introducing major plot twists through the medium of completely mundane office paperwork, which creates a strange dissonance where people are screaming at each other about betrayal while holding manila folders that clearly contain nothing more than standard photocopies of utility bills. Fardeen Khan enters the mess about forty minutes in as Vikram, playing the kind of rich guy who wears leather jackets inside a beach house and speaks with the hushed, gravelly menace of a man who has practiced his villain laugh in front of the bathroom mirror until his throat hurt.

The central performance from Kareena Kapoor is fascinating because she is basically trying to play a classic noir femme fatale while wearing cargo pants and participating in elaborate dance sequences on beaches where the sand looks suspiciously like grey gravel. She has this way of narrowing her eyes when she is lying that doesn't actually convince you she is dangerous so much as it makes you think she forgot whether she left her apartment door unlocked. Shahid, on the other hand, is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting with his eyebrows. When he discovers he has been set up to take the fall for a massive financial fraud, he doesn't look angry so much as he looks like his dog has just died and he isn't entirely sure who is supposed to feed it now. It is a messy, vulnerable kind of acting that feels entirely out of place in a slick thriller, which is actually why it works better than the polished nothingness Fardeen Khan brings to the table.

The soundtrack by Anu Malik is heavy on those mid-tempo romantic numbers that sound suspiciously like three other songs you heard on the radio coming out of a local auto-rickshaw that morning. There is one particular track that repeats during nearly every dramatic confrontation, a soaring string arrangement that swells every time someone opens a car door or looks thoughtfully out a rain-streaked window. It gets to be a bit much by the third time you hear it in the same twenty-minute stretch. The cinematography by Chota K. Naidu loves a good Dutch angle for no discernible reason, tilting the horizon whenever characters are having a conversation about offshore bank accounts as if the earth itself is getting slightly seasick from the sheer absurdity of the plot mechanics. The editing cuts away from reaction shots about half a second too early, robbing the actors of the chance to land their punchlines or their gasps, which gives the whole middle section of the film a stuttering, breathless rhythm that doesn't quite know where it wants to park.

What makes the movie interesting, if we're being completely honest, is how awkwardly it tries to graft Western thriller tropes onto the moral economy of Hindi cinema without ever figuring out how to handle the collateral damage. In Hollywood pictures like Double Jeopardy, which this film clearly watched on VHS in a hotel room in Bandra, the revenge mechanics are clean and driven by a clear sense of institutional failure. Here, everything gets bogged down in familial obligations and the weirdly specific rules of Bollywood romance where you can commit grand larceny and attempted murder, but you still have to look suitably tragic while standing under a streetlamp if the girl you framed rejects you. The thematic core of the picture isn't really about greed or manipulation; it's about the terrifying realization that the person you thought was just a nice girl from the neighborhood might actually be better at accounting fraud than you are.

Kim Sharma shows up in a supporting role that consists almost entirely of wearing halter tops and looking concerned in the background of parties that look like they were catered by a local bakery with leftover samosas. She doesn't get a single line that isn't functionally an exposition drop, yet she manages to invest her two minutes of screen time with a level of commitment that puts half the principal cast to shame. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound design completely drops her dialogue during a crucial club scene, replacing her voice with an over-modulated techno beat that sounds like a lawnmower falling down a metal staircase.

The second half descends into a series of double-crosses so convoluted that even the characters seem to lose track of who is currently blackmailing whom. Vikram and Neha have this whole dynamic where they communicate mostly through whispered phone calls in empty hotel lobbies, which seems wildly inefficient given that they apparently live in the same house. Shahid’s character transforms from a timid accountant into a man who knows how to operate heavy machinery and evade local law enforcement with the casual ease of someone who reads Tom Clancy novels on the weekend. The logic of the narrative completely unravels around the hour-and-a-half mark, leaving behind only the pure, unadulterated spectacle of famous people running through rain machines in designer knitwear.

Hindi movies from this era often had a very specific relationship with money, treating it less as a medium of exchange and more as a magical weather event that could suddenly appear or disappear based on the emotional requirements of the scene. Fida captures that weird transitional phase when digital technology was just starting to enter the frame as a plot device, meaning characters spend an awful lot of time staring intently at chunky CRT monitors and slamming computer mice around to indicate extreme cyber-crime activity. The direction never quite finds a way to make wire transfers visually exciting, so we get endless reaction shots of people squinting at spreadsheets while the music pulses like a migraine. It’s an exhausting viewing experience, yet it has a certain kind of clumsy charm that keeps you from turning it off, mostly because you genuinely cannot guess which character is going to betray their accomplice by switching suitcases in the next five minutes.

The closing moments offer no real resolution to the mess that preceded them, preferring instead to wrap up the narrative with a screeching tire sound effect and a freeze-frame that catches Kareena Kapoor mid-blink. It isn't a clever ending, and it doesn't try to be. It just stops because the film has run out of plot points and the budget for blue gel filters has officially been exhausted. You walk away from it feeling like you've spent two hours inside a malfunctioning air conditioner, cold in some spots and entirely too warm in others, with a low-level headache that lingers long after the credits have faded to black.