Sunil Shetty is wearing a leather jacket that looks like it cost thirty rupees at a pavement stall in Linking Road and honestly I cannot stop looking at the sleeves because they are visibly bunching up around his forearms in a way that suggests the wardrobe department grabbed whatever was in the extra-large bin during the lunch break and called it character development for a hardened encounter specialist.

Madhur Bhandarkar made this right after Chandni Bar and you can feel the residual grease of Mumbai's underworld clinging to the frame like humidity in July, though the shift from dance bars to police headquarters feels a bit like watching someone try to paint a fresco with a roller they found in the back of a van. The screenplay lurches forward on the back of dialogue that sounds like it was translated from Marathi by someone who only had a dictionary from 1984, trading the rhythmic punch of traditional hindi movies for a sort of flat-footed procedural urgency that never quite settles into a groove.

Akshay Kumar plays DCP Appa Kadam Devre with a toothpick permanently parked in the left corner of his mouth, chewing on it with the aggressive distraction of a man who has three more shifts to pull and zero patience for departmental politics. He doesn't give a performance so much as he occupies the space with a kind of muscular annoyance, glaring at subordinates and kicking filing cabinets until the paperwork rattles, which works fine for the first forty minutes before you realize he has exactly two facial expressions and neither of them involves listening to what anyone else is saying in the scene.

Then there is Jackie Shroff as DCP Pratap Shergill, strutting through the police commissionerate in trousers so tight they probably required three assistants and a shoehorn to get into, radiating that specific brand of bored vanity he perfected somewhere around 1995 and never really saw any reason to update. He shares a scene with Raveena Tandon where they discuss jurisdictional disputes while eating what appears to be lukewarm poha from a plastic container, and the chemistry between them is less romantic tension and more two exhausted contract workers waiting for the generator to kick back on.

The supporting cast features enough weathered character actors to populate an entire precinct in Thane, most of them relegated to standing behind desks holding manila folders or shouting into heavy black landline phones that probably didn't even have a dial tone plugged into the wall. There is an over-reliance on sudden whip pans whenever someone mentions an informant named Iqbal, a stylistic tic that feels less like stylish direction and more like an editor trying desperately to hide the fact that the extras in the background stopped walking and started staring directly at the lens.

Shifting focus to the visual side of things, the cinematography by Rajan Kinge loves a good green filter, splashing the interiors of every warehouse and interrogation room with a sickly fluorescent glare that makes everyone look like they have mild jaundice and forgot to drink water for three days. The background score by Anand Raj Anand crashes into scenes without warning, dropping heavy percussion over dialogue about municipal budgets and routine traffic stops as if every single conversation about a stolen scooter is the preamble to a gunfight in a quarry.

Bollywood has a long and storied history of treating cops as either saints or monsters, but this movie tries to split the difference by making them look like grumpy bureaucrats who occasionally get to shoot people in the legs, which is a weirdly mundane middle ground that robs the action sequences of any real momentum. Compare it to Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya, where every silence carried the weight of institutional rot, and you realize how much this film relies on background noise and loud bass drops to convince the audience that something important is happening on screen.

There is a recurring needle-drop during the raid sequences that uses the exact same four-note brass sting every single time a character draws a service weapon, and by the fourth time it happens you start wondering if the sound editor just had one file on their desktop and kept hitting paste until the reels were full. The action choreography itself is surprisingly restrained for the era, avoiding the wire-fu nonsense that was starting to creep into mainstream hindi cinema around that time, opting instead for a lot of clumsy scuffling in mud and broken glass where the stuntmen clearly know each other's names and are trying very hard not to kick anyone in the jaw too hard.

The thematic undercurrents gesture vaguely toward police corruption and the friction between political interference and street-level justice, but the script is too impatient to let any of those ideas breathe for more than ten seconds before cutting to another wide shot of an Ambassador car turning a corner in Dadar. It wants to be an expose on the bureaucratic paralysis of the Mumbai police force, but it keeps getting distracted by its own wardrobe choices and the sheer volume of Akshay Kumar's belt buckles.

By the time the third act rolls around with its obligatory shootout in a disused mill compound where nobody seems to run out of ammunition despite carrying standard-issue revolvers that hold six rounds, the exhaustion has settled into the marrow of the picture, leaving you staring at the texture of the plaster walls in the background just to stay awake. It is a loud, sweaty, occasionally competent piece of commercial filmmaking that sits awkwardly between the gritty social realism of the nineties and the glossy, brain-dead action spectacles that would dominate bollywood movies for the next decade, never quite figuring out which audience it actually wants to please.