Arshad Warsi wears sunglasses indoors through half of Zila Ghaziabad, and if I'm honest, that tells you almost everything you need to know about the weather inside this particular corner of western Uttar Pradesh. The lighting is constantly overcooked, suggesting a sun that beats down with personal malice even on characters standing under concrete overpasses, which makes the whole enterprise look less like a gritty regional gangster saga and more like a heavily filtered perfume commercial that happened to stumble into a shootout. This is the kind of cinema where every punch sounds like a wet sack of flour hitting a hardwood floor, amplified to a ridiculous degree by a sound designer who clearly lost a bet. You sit there in the dark, watching men in safari suits scream about land grabs and local elections, wondering how we got from the sharp-edged cynicism of Company to this hyper-saturated mud pit where every single person on screen is sweating through their polyester trousers. It’s loud, it’s frantic, and it refuses to settle down for even a single second, hurling characters at each other like angry cats thrown into a burlap sack just to see who comes out bleeding.

Director Anand Kumar shoots the action scenes with a frantic handheld camera that feels like it’s having a panic attack, zooming in on eyes widening before impact and lingering on slow-motion cartridge casings spinning through the dusty air until you start checking your watch. The screenplay by Vinay Sharma tries to cram three distinct political feuds and a blood feud into a two-hour runtime, leaving narrative logic gasping for breath somewhere around the forty-minute mark as alliances shift faster than a dodgy politician changing parties on election eve. Characters appear, shout dialogue that sounds like it was written on the back of a cigarette packet during a lunch break, and then get riddled with bullets before you’ve even caught their names. It’s a mess of structural choices where flashbacks are dropped in randomly like misplaced puzzle pieces from a different box entirely, disrupting whatever crude momentum the picture has managed to scrape together. There are moments where the film almost works as a mindless B-movie throwaway, leaning hard into the sort of gonzo regional violence that Bollywood movies occasionally stumble into when they want to shock the multiplex crowd, but then it pulls back to deliver a solemn moralizing speech about the corruption of youth or some other nonsense it doesn't actually care about.

Sanjay Dutt lumbers through his scenes as Inspector Pritam Singh with the tired, heavy-lidded authority of a man who has played this exact same lawman variant in a dozen other projects over the past twenty years. He doesn't stretch himself here, but he doesn't need to, because the camera mostly just tracks him as he walks down alleyways with a shotgun held casually across his chest like he's out for a Sunday stroll in the park. Opposite him, Vivek Oberoi plays Satbir Gujjar with a kind of intense, vein-bulging fury that feels exhausting to watch after the third consecutive scene of him roaring at the sky in a muddy courtyard. Oberoi tries desperately to make you believe in this man's tragic transformation from mild-mannered schoolteacher to ruthless gang lord, but the script gives him nothing to work with except monologues about revenge that sound recycled from old Amitabh Bachchan scripts read through a megaphone. Then there is Arshad Warsi, who manages to inject a tiny bit of unpredictable manic energy into his role as Mahender Fauji, chewing on the scenery with visible relish while everyone else looks like they're just waiting for their check to clear.

The background score by Bapi-Tuttul is an unholy disaster of aggressive electric guitars and screeching synthesizer riffs that assault your ears every time a character so much as picks up a tea glass, drowning out half the dialogue and leaving actors to shout their lines even louder just to be heard over the racket. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me throughout the runtime: the exact same three-note brass sting plays every single time Vivek Oberoi glares at someone from across a dusty jeep, which happens about forty-seven times before the intermission. Cinematographer Natarajan Subramaniam drenches everything in a sickly yellow-and-teal palette that makes western UP look like a nuclear wasteland crossed with a highway dhaba, stripping away any natural texture the locations might have had. The editing doesn't help matters, cutting between coverage angles with a jerky impatience that suggests the editor was trying to catch a late-night train out of town and wanted to wrap things up before the platform gates locked.

Beneath all the flying lead and the aggressively masculine posturing, the film gestures vaguely toward themes of feudal power structures and the rot of local democracy, but it lacks the patience to actually examine any of it. Hindi films often fall into this trap of dressing up standard-issue revenge melodramas as deep sociological commentary on the state of rural politics, hoping that sticking a few newsreel clips of real politicians in the opening credits will pass for earnest critique. The women in the cast, including Minissha Lamba, are treated as little more than decorative props or tragic catalysts designed to give the male leads another excuse to pull out their revolvers and start blazing away at the nearest brick wall. It’s a deeply old-fashioned worldview wrapped up in slick modern digital cinematography, recycling tropes from nineties action trash without bringing any fresh irony or subversion to the table. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in an abandoned brick kiln with rain pouring down from nowhere in particular, you’re not invested in who lives or dies, you’re just mildly relieved that the noise is finally going to stop.