Arshad Warsi says "bhai" in a way that implies he has been awake for thirty-six hours straight and none of them went well. It is not a huge detail, but it sits right at the front of Sunday, a movie that stumbles into the theater with its shoelaces tied together and just decides to keep running anyway. Rohit Shetty directed this thing back when his car-crash budgets were modest enough to leave room for people actually talking to each other, or at least yelling in cramped Delhi apartments. You can feel the air-conditioning humming in the background of the sound design, that low generic rattle of a production office that forgot to buy proper mufflers. Hindi films from this era had a weird obsession with characters who were simultaneously private investigators and complete slackers, which is a neat trick if you want to avoid shooting actual procedural scenes.

Ajay Devgan does not blink for the first twenty minutes. He plays a cop named Rajveer Randhawa who carries a leather-bound diary like it’s full of state secrets when it’s probably just takeout menus and insurance claims. His eyes have that flat, dead-fish glaze he reserves for comedies where the director forgot to yell cut before the punchline landed. He stands in doorways with his hands in his pockets, leaning his weight against the frame as if the whole set might tip over if he shifts two inches to the left. He looks tired. Bollywood movies often require their leading men to look like gods who can bench-press a Maruti Zen, but Devgan looks like a guy who just got rejected for a car loan and has to walk home in the rain.

Ayesha Takia is supposed to be the mystery everyone is trying to solve, this random dubbing artist who wakes up on a Monday morning with zero memory of the previous twenty-four hours and a dead body in her trunk. She plays amnesia with a lot of heavy breathing and wide-eyed staring into the middle distance, which gets old by the time the interval rolls around. The screenplay by Yunus Sajawal treats her memory loss like a lost set of car keys you left in the freezer. It’s an absurd premise that requires everybody on screen to take it completely seriously while eating samosas out of grease-stained paper bags. There is a supporting actor near the third reel whose voice is dubbed by someone who sounds three feet away from the microphone in an entirely different room, and if I'm honest, it bugged me every single time he opened his mouth. You can hear the tinny echo of the dubbing booth bouncing off the walls of his nostrils.

Arshad Warsi and Irfan Khan carry the comedy, or at least they try to until the script forces them into scenes where they have to pretend an ostrich is a clue. Khan plays a local don with these ridiculous sunglasses that slide down his nose every time he tries to look menacing, and he reads his threat-laden dialogue like he’s reading the morning paper at a red light. He was always too good for these projects, slumming it between intense arthouse gigs just to pay for his kids' school fees or a new kitchen, but he still commits to the bit with this weird little twitch in his jaw. The comic timing between him and Warsi has a loose, sloppy rhythm that feels like two guys improvising in a parking lot because the catering truck is late. It’s funny in spots, but mostly because you can tell they were bored out of their skulls waiting for lighting setups to finish.

The cinematography looks like it was lit with three halogen lamps bought from a hardware store down the street from Film City. Everything has this yellow-green tint that makes the streets of Delhi look like they were smeared in turmeric and old mustard. When they move into interior locations, the shadows cluster in the corners of the rooms in jagged triangles that don't match where the windows are supposed to be. It has the visual texture of an extended shampoo commercial directed by someone who watched one too many Guy Ritchie movies on a cracked laptop screen. The editing doesn't help either, lingering a full three seconds too long on reaction shots of extras pretending to read newspapers upside down in a park.

Hindi movies love these convoluted loops where everybody is chasing the same six people through the same three alleys until you forget why the conflict started in the first place. Sunday borrows heavily from that Telugu thriller aesthetic which became popular around the mid-2000s, though it lacks the sheer kinetic joy of something like Pokiri. It’s messy and loud and the background score by D. Imman sounds like a midi keyboard falling down a metal staircase. Every time a car turns a corner, the brass section hits you between the eyes with a chord that belongs in a wrestling pay-per-view. The lyrics to the item numbers are essentially strings of English words that rhyme with "tonight" shouted over a four-on-the-floor beat designed to rattle the subwoofers of a modified Honda Civic.

We are supposed to care about the romance tucked away inside this pile of nonsense, but Devgan and Takia have the chemistry of two people standing next to each other in a bank queue while the air conditioner is broken. He stares at her with that same heavy-lidded expression while she explains her recurring nightmare about a red scooter. It’s hard to build tension when the plot mechanics require the characters to be staggering idiots for ninety minutes straight just so the third-act twist can happen in an abandoned warehouse filled with stacked tires. You can smell the fake dust they threw around the floor to make the place look abandoned. The dialogue drops these little pseudo-philosophical clunkers about trust and memory that sound like they were pulled from the back of a calendar gifted by a local insurance agent.

The supporting cast features Suresh Menon doing his usual bit as the nervous sidekick who sweats profusely under studio lights, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief that is visibly damp by scene two. It’s a thankless gig that requires him to scream at weird intervals and get shoved into closets by people who are six inches taller than him. He gives it everything he has, which is mostly just high-pitched squeaks and wide arm gestures. You feel bad for him because you know he spent four hours in makeup getting his hair combed into that ridiculous side-part just to be thrown off a porch by Devgan in a slow-motion shot that repeats three times from different angles.

There is a sequence where everyone ends up in a police station that looks less like a municipal building and more like an Ikea showroom that forgot to sell sofas. The desk officers are shouting in Punjabi while the suspects are eating biscuits out of a shared tin. It captures that chaotic, administrative fatigue of urban India better than any of the actual mystery elements do. Nobody knows what is happening, least of all the writer, who seems to have solved the plot by throwing darts at a corkboard covered in polaroids of random suspects. You can practically see the whiteout peeling off the pages of the script where they changed the killer's identity three days before wrapping principal photography in Goa.

By the time the climax rolls around in that tire warehouse, the movie has abandoned any pretense of logic and just settled into a loud, screeching marathon of men throwing punches that miss their targets by at least six inches. The sound effects department dropped a bowling-pin sound every time someone got hit in the ribs, which adds this surreal cartoonish layer to a scene that is already dying of exhaustion. It is a completely forgettable piece of work that exists primarily to fill an afternoon slot on a satellite television channel when nothing else is on. You watch it because you are folding laundry or waiting for a delivery, and when it’s over, you forget the title before the credits finish scrolling past the lens. It occupies that vast, gray middle space of cinema where nothing hurts, nothing sticks, and nobody is going to remember any of this by Tuesday morning.