Tabu keeps touching her eyebrow in this movie, a tiny tic she probably invented on the fourth day of shooting when the heat on set was making everyone's makeup melt off their faces, and if I'm honest, that little nervous rub tells you more about her grief than half the heavy dialogue she's handed by the writers. Ajay Devgn doesn't blink enough, which is a choice that worked fine when he was just playing a terrified cable guy trying to save his family from the Goa police, but now that he's seven years older and the town won't stop talking about him, it just looks like he's trying very hard to remember where he parked his car. Hindi films rarely know what to do with a sequel that has to rehash every single twist from the first hit without completely boring the audience to tears, yet director Abhishek Pathak manages to keep the momentum going by essentially filming the entire middle hour like a slow-moving interrogation room where nobody is actually allowed to sit down.

The screenplay by Jeethu Joseph, adapted with some chunky dialogue changes for a broader audience, relies heavily on people walking into police stations and staring at filing cabinets with expressions of deep existential dread. Vijay Salgaonkar is still running his little cable business, still obsessed with movies, still hiding the body in a place so obvious that the entire logic of the first film hinges on a suspension of disbelief that stretches thinner every time someone brings it up. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often the background score swells with these giant orchestral hits every time Vijay looks at a piece of paper, as if the audience wouldn't quite grasp that reading a police report is a tense activity without twenty cellos screaming in our ears.

That kind of heavy-handed musical punctuation drags down what is otherwise a genuinely tense cat-and-mouse game between Devgn and Jaideep Ahlawat, who joins the cast as a new IG with a grudge and a habit of chewing on toothpicks while he threatens suspects in damp basements. Ahlawat brings an unpredictable energy to these Hindi movies that usually rely on wooden villains who just shout a lot before getting kicked through a glass table. When he's onscreen with Rajat Kapoor, who returns as the grieving father and former IG whose posture gets slightly more curved with every scene, the movie almost manages to transcend its soapy origins and feel like something out of a mid-period Costa-Gavras political thriller.

Shriya Saran gets very little to do besides look worried in the kitchen while stirring large pots of dal, which feels like a waste of an actor who proved she could hold her own in the emotional heavy lifting of the previous installment, though she does have one great moment on a rainy porch where she nearly drops a glass of water just from hearing a car door slam down the street. The cinematography by Jomon T. John leans hard into the rainy, slate-grey aesthetic of coastal Maharashtra, making everything look like it was shot through a dirty windshield, which matches the murky moral compromises everyone on screen is making. We are supposed to be rooting for Vijay because he loves his daughters, but the film keeps dropping subtle reminders that he has effectively destroyed two other families in the process, turning his everyday working-class virtue into something far more complicated and borderline sinister.

The pacing starts to drag around the hundred-minute mark when the investigation stalls out in a montage of forensic labs and dusty archives that feels like it was edited by someone who had a plane to catch, though it picks right back up the second Tabu walks back into the frame with her hair pulled back into a severe bun. She doesn't have to raise her voice to be terrifying; she just stands in the doorway of a courtroom and looks at Devgn with the dead-eyed stare of a mother who spent seven years digging holes in her backyard looking for her only child, which completely eclipses the rather silly courtroom theatrics that close out the narrative. There's a supporting character, a local gossip played with delicious menace by Ishita Dutta's younger sister, who shows up in about four scenes just to stir the pot, and every time she's on screen the film threatens to turn into a standard soap opera before someone abruptly slams a door and drags us back into the thriller plot.

Bollywood has a terrible habit of sanding down the moral edges of its protagonists so they remain palatable to multiplex crowds on a Friday night, and while Vijay Salgaonkar doesn't get punished for his crimes in a way that satisfies the legal code, the final shots leave him looking remarkably alone in his oversized fortress of a house. That lingering ambiguity saves the picture from becoming just another preachy morality play about the long arm of the law, even if the last five minutes require a series of flashbacks that explain the plot to anyone who spent the intermission staring at their phone.