There is a specific kind of CGI runway tarmac that immediately tells you a Hindi film had to cut its budget somewhere between the pre-production meetings and the third schedule. Bellbottom features quite a lot of it, stretching toward digital mountains that look like they were rendered on an overheating laptop in a basement in Lokhandwala. If I'm honest, that artificial gray strip set the tone for a lot of what followed, because the movie relies heavily on you not looking too closely at the edges of things. The year is 1984, or at least that is what the title cards keep aggressively reminding us every time the location shifts to a different capital city, though everyone’s hair looks suspiciously conditioned for a decade known primarily for humidity and bad blow-dryers. Akshay Kumar plays Anshul Malhotra, an undercover operative with the RAW cryptonym Bellbottom, who gets recruited because he plays chess well and speaks fluent English with a Punjab accent that surfaces whenever he has to yell at someone about national security. He wears a series of wide-lapel suits that must have weighed fifteen pounds each, padded at the shoulders to give him the silhouette of a vintage refrigerator. For the first twenty minutes, the movie moves with the frantic energy of an intern running across Delhi traffic with a file that was due ten minutes ago, cutting between politicians yelling in wood-paneled rooms and maps with red blinking lights that belong in an old episode of Doordarshan programming. Nobody in this operation seems to use a secure line without making a big production out of hanging up a heavy rotary phone with a dramatic clack. It is a small thing but it bugged me every single time.

Director Ranjit M. Tewari has a straightforward approach to pacing that basically consists of making sure nobody has time to ask whether any of this makes sense before the next explosion happens or someone starts shouting about the Prime Minister's safety. He directs action sequences the way an accountant fills out a tax form, hitting every required deduction with maximum bureaucratic efficiency but very little joy. The screenplay, credited to Aseem Arrora and Parveez Shaikh, borrows heavily from the real-life Indian Airlines hijackings of the eighties while sanding down any historical friction that might make the audience uncomfortable or require actual nuance. Instead of messy geopolitics, we get cardboard terrorists who speak in booming, echoing voiceovers about revenge and humiliation while pacing around a hijacked cabin that clearly smells like fresh studio plywood. Vaani Kapoor pops up periodically as Anshul’s wife, wearing pastel sarees and looking endlessly supportive while holding cups of tea that remain suspiciously opaque and steamless no matter how long she stands by the window waiting for her husband to return from saving the republic. Her character exists entirely to provide emotional stakes that feel photocopied from three dozen other mid-tier Bollywood movies where the spy has to balance his love for the motherland with his love for the woman who stays home crying over an unread newspaper. Huma Qureshi fares slightly better as an operative embedded in Dubai, wearing sharp trench coats and firing submachine guns with a scowl that suggests she would rather be anywhere else, which honestly gives her scenes a strange kind of authenticity. When she interacts with Kumar, the dialogue hits the floor with a heavy thud, two people reading lines they were given five minutes before the cameras rolled while staring intensely past each other's ears.

Kumar has spent the last decade refining a very specific, low-effort persona where he just kind of nods through scenes while looking mildly disappointed in everyone around him, and Bellbottom shows him leaning hard into that autopilot zone. He does not run so much as briskly jog with purpose, his face set in an expression of grim determination that never shifts whether he is interrogating a spy or eating a samosa in a safehouse. He lacks the coiled, neurotic energy that made John Abraham effective in Madras Cafe, replacing that specific gravity with a dull, dependable neutrality that keeps the narrative moving forward without ever charging it with actual danger. When he has to do his big emotional flashback about his mother, the tear wells up in the exact same corner of his eye that it did in half a dozen previous patriotic dramas, proving that his tear ducts have their own union representation. The supporting cast does what they can with accents that wander across the Middle East and Europe like tourists without a map, particularly the actor playing the primary hijacker who delivers every threat as though he is reading the ingredients off the back of a shampoo bottle. There is a mid-film interrogation sequence in a dimly lit basement where three different characters take turns shouting at a captured informant, and the editing cuts between their angry faces so fast it feels like a badly spliced punk rock video from 1992. The soundtrack by Ram Sampath and Tanishk Bagchi tries to manufacture urgency with heavy synth basslines that rumble your seat every time someone opens a briefcase, though none of the musical numbers manage to stick in the memory for longer than it takes to walk out of the screening room and into the parking lot.

Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi usually brings a lived-in grit to his projects, but here his lensing is flattened by aggressive color grading that bathes every exterior in a sickly, turmeric-tinted orange meant to signify foreign heat. Even the night scenes look like they were shot at four in the afternoon with an ND filter screwed onto the lens, robbing the espionage elements of any actual shadows or mystery. The production design department clearly spent their entire budget on vintage Mercedes sedans and rotary phones, leaving the airport interiors looking remarkably like a convention center hallway in Greater Noida rented for a long weekend. Yet there is an earnestness to the logistical mess that prevents it from becoming outright tedious, a sort of blue-collar filmmaking that just wants to punch the clock, deliver three fistfights, and let everyone go home before dinner. The political maneuvering is painted in strokes so broad they would require a roller rather than a brush, with Indira Gandhi portrayed mostly through dramatic silhouettes and tight shots of her hands holding a teacup while making grim pronouncements about national honor. Hindi movies have always had a complicated relationship with state power, and this one treats the intelligence apparatus like an efficient family-run business where everyone pitches in during a crisis and nobody asks awkward questions about human rights or international law. That lack of cynicism makes it feel slightly old-fashioned, an artifact of an older studio system where the hero always gets the code right on the final second of the countdown clock without ever breaking a sweat or tearing his expensive trousers.

By the time the hostage crisis wraps up on a dusty airstrip with a fistfight that goes on for at least four minutes too long, you realize the film has not left a single footprint on your brain. It is not an offensive disaster of the sort that makes you question your life choices on a Thursday evening, nor is it a clever genre exercise that manages to transcend its budget restrictions through sheer directorial cunning. It simply occupies space, a ninety-minute television episode stretched to two hours and twenty minutes because multiplexes charge the same ticket price regardless of narrative density. The sound design leans heavily on the Foley artists stomping on gravel and cocking pistols with an audible metal-on-metal metallic ring that was probably added in post-production by an enthusiastic intern who watched too many Die Hard re-runs. There are moments when the camera lingers on a villain's twitchy eye for just a beat too long, draining the suspense through sheer comedic over-emphasis. You leave the theater thinking about how much better the stunts would have been if they had just hired a stunt coordinator who didn't rely entirely on wire-fu for guys getting thrown across a baggage claim carousel. It's a small thing, but those plastic suitcases bouncing off the linoleum floors didn't even sound heavy. They sounded like Tupperware tumbling down a flight of carpeted stairs, which pretty much sums up the whole enterprise from start to finish.