Anurag Kashyap wears the exact same blue checked shirt for roughly half of Akira and nobody in the costume department seems to have thought that maybe a corrupt cop with enough disposable cash to bribe half of Mumbai would own a second button-down. It is a small thing that bugged me while watching A.R. Murugadoss try to graft a Tamil revenge vehicle onto the topography of Jodhpur and Delhi, dragging Sonakshi Sinha along for a ride that demands she play both the aggrieved outsider and a roundhouse-kicking force of nature without dropping her guard. Hindi films have a long and storied tradition of taking quiet, brooding Tamil originals and blowing them up into twenty-foot neon signboards of moral righteousness, and Makkal Selvan Vijay Sethupathi probably dodged a bullet by staying very far away from this particular remake train. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise smells faintly of a pitch meeting that went sideways after the second draft.

Sonakshi Sinha charges into the frame with her jaw set so hard you can hear the enamel grinding against itself from the fifth row of the stalls, throwing kicks that look genuinely painful for everyone involved, though the editing room clearly didn't trust her empty-handed reach because they’ve spiked every impact sound with the frequency of a falling anvil. She plays a girl whose father raised her to punch back twice as hard when the local eve-teasers or corrupt constables step across an imaginary line in the dirt, which works fine until the narrative traps her inside a mental asylum where the orderliness of the facility makes zero sense given how casually brutal Anurag Kashyap's ACP Rane is operating out on the street. The choreography has that heavy, stomping gravity of a video game promotional trailer where everyone waits their turn to take a flying boot to the ribs, but Sinha stays grounded even when the wires and stunt doubles are practically visible in the reflection of a car window. She doesn't have the jittery, exposed-nerve vulnerability that Konkona Sen Sharma brings to her role as the investigating officer who drinks tea out of a chipped mug and looks like she hasn't slept a full night since the monsoon started, creating this strange friction where the hero is basically a comic book character wandering through an unglamorous procedural.

Kashyap is having the time of his life shouting obscenities and slapping subordinates around with an ivory paperweight, chewing the scenery with enough enthusiasm to make up for the dialogue writer taking an extended lunch break, though his character is so cartoonishly evil that you keep waiting for him to tie someone to railroad tracks. He doesn't act so much as vibrate with a kind of nasty suburban rage, the sort of guy who wears sunglasses indoors not because he's cool but because he hates your face, and it works because he refuses to play the intellectual gangster angle that half the villains in recent Bollywood movies rely on to sound sophisticated. He just hits people and laughs at their teeth. Konkona, meanwhile, anchors the second half with tired sighs and tired shoes, operating as the only person on screen who seems to realize she is in a movie about institutional rot rather than an audition tape for a mixed martial arts league, and her scenes opposite Sinha have an odd, jagged chemistry where neither performer knows quite how hard to lean into the melodrama.

The cinematography by R.D. Rajasekhar loves blue filters about as much as a teenager discovering Photoshop for the first time, washing every police station and college corridor in an icy teal that makes everybody look like they have mild anemia. It is a very loud, very pushy visual style that never lets the audience settle into a space for more than four seconds before a whip-pan or a crash zoom reminds us that we are watching an action sequence, which gets exhausting right around the forty-minute mark when the third identical fight breaks out in a dimly lit multi-story parking lot. Vishal-Shekhar's music drops in every time someone gets punched in the throat, which happens so often that the orchestral stings start to sound like a woodpecker with a migraine, and I found myself actively tuning out the vocal tracks during the montage sequences because they kept explaining the emotional stakes of scenes we had just watched play out with our own eyes.

Murugadoss is interested in the way female autonomy gets treated as a direct physical threat by men in uniform, which is a sturdy enough foundation for a genre movie if you are willing to let the dirt stick to your fingernails, but he keeps cutting away from the social messiness to stage elaborate wire-fu acrobatics in warehouses. Akira herself isn't a person so much as an accumulation of trauma responses and roundhouse techniques, a walking talking poster for self-defense classes that occasionally stops to cry over a framed photograph of her dad before going back to breaking collarbones. The movie wants to be an empowering howl against victim-blaming, yet it can't resist framing Sinha's victories as superhero origin moments complete with slow-motion dust clouds and swelling brass sections, flattening the actual terror of institutional harassment into something you can comfortably cheer for while eating popcorn.

Watching Akira is a bit like sitting through a three-hour gym workout run by an instructor who read one book on feminism and three books on John Woo movies and decided to mash them together into a blender with a heavy metal soundtrack. The supporting cast pop in and out of the plot like ghosts in a haunted house, delivering expository dialogue with the glazed expression of actors who realized halfway through the schedule that their scenes were going to be chopped to ribbons in the cutting room anyway, and some of the dubbing on the background henchmen is so loose it looks like a foreign-language import. Hindi movies have struggled for decades to find a credible middle ground between the gritty art-house thriller and the star-driven masala vehicle, and this one splits right down the middle, leaving neither half enough room to breathe before the next plot point arrives via baseball bat to the skull. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in a courtyard filled with puddles that reflect neon signs that were never there in the wide shots, the movie has essentially yelled itself hoarse.

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching a competent crew execute a deeply mediocre script, especially when Konkona Sen Sharma is right there in the corner of the frame trying to ground a scene about police corruption with a flat, weary glance that tells you she knows exactly how these investigations actually end in the real world. You spend two hours waiting for the narrative to give up its cartoon logic and let the characters be messy human beings instead of chess pieces on a revenge board, only for the final scene to double down on the vigilante justice fantasy with a straight face. It is a loud, sweaty, forgettable exercise in genre carpentry that works best when you stop expecting a coherent social commentary and just watch Sonakshi Sinha throw bad guys through drywall.