John Abraham runs a lot in Force 2, which is fine, because running is basically his primary emotional register in most movies he does, but here he does it with such grim determination that you start to wonder if he is trying to outrun the script itself, a script that gets progressively heavier and less interested in actual momentum as it drags its carcass across various European capitals. If I'm honest, the opening sequence alone sets a tone of such breathless self-importance that you instantly miss the simpler, stupider joys of the 2011 original directed by Nishikant Kamat, a film that at least knew it was a B-movie throwaway and leaned into the sweat and sleaze of Mumbai underworld reckoning instead of dressing itself up in this drab, geopolitically confused James Bond cosplay.

Abhinay Deo takes over directorial duties here and trades Kamat's gritty, tactile framing for something much slicker and far more anonymous, shooting the Budapest and China sequences with that desaturated blue-gray grade that makes every contemporary action thriller look like it was rendered in a damp basement by an algorithm. The screenplay, credited to a few different writers including Jasvinder Bath and Parveez Shaikh, tries desperately to graft a ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy about murdered RAW agents onto a standard revenge template, but the gears grind so loudly you can practically hear the script doctors panicking in the margins. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often characters deliver top-secret dossier info while standing in the middle of heavily touristed public squares in broad daylight, whispering about black ops as if ambient street noise is a valid encryption method.

Then there is Sonakshi Sinha playing a RAW analyst named Yashika, and she spends the first forty minutes looking like she wandered onto the wrong set while trying to find craft services, delivering every single line with the exact same monotone indignation, her face locked into a posture of permanent skepticism that makes you wonder why her superiors trust her with a stapler, let alone high-level counter-espionage. She tries to throw a few kicks later on, and credit where it is due, the stunt coordinators gave her some physical business to do that avoids the usual double-heavy editing tricks, but her chemistry with Abraham has the crackle of two wet logs being shoved together in a damp shed. They share a flashback sequence meant to establish a fallen comrade's legacy that lands with such spectacular thudding weightlessness that you could hear popcorn chewing over it in the row behind me.

Tahir Raj Bhasin steps into the antagonist shoes as the rogue mastermind Shiv, and he brings a jittery, smart-alecky energy that threatens to wake the movie up every time he’s on screen, channeling a bit of that same sneering menace he had in Mardaani without quite finding a fresh angle on the aggrieved-bureaucrat villain trope. Bhasin talks too much, obviously, because movie villains are legally required to explain their entire socio-political grievances to a tied-up protagonist before doing anything interesting, yet he manages to sell the patter with enough ironic detachment that you forgive the blatant exposition dumps. He plays chess against an invisible opponent and monologues into webcams while wearing hoodies, which is basically the modern cinematic shorthand for being a dangerous genius who hates the system.

The cinematography by Mohanan relies way too heavily on drone shots that swoop over European rooftops to tell you we have changed locations, as if the audience is too stupid to recognize a Gothic cathedral without an aerial establishing shot preceding it. Whenever the action cuts to a hand-to-hand brawl, the camera shakes so violently you could be watching a washing machine tumble bricks, obscuring whatever choreography Abraham and the stunt team worked out in the gym. It is frustrating because Abraham clearly has the physical mass to sell a brutal, bruising impact, but the editing chops it all up into such microscopic fragments that you never get a clean sense of geography or momentum. Action in Hindi films used to rely on a certain theatrical clarity, for better or worse, but here we get the worst of both worlds: CGI blood spatters that look like digital paint drops and shaky-cam coverage that feels designed to hide a lack of actual impact.

Let's talk about the soundtrack for a second, because the background score by Sameer Uddin pounds away at your eardrums with monotonous electronic percussion that kicks in every single time someone walks down a hallway with purpose, which happens every three minutes. They even shoehorn in a bizarrely placed romantic track that grinds the plot to a screeching halt just when the villain is threatening to detonate a bomb, a structural miscalculation so old-school and boneheaded it feels almost nostalgic. Bollywood movies have always struggled with tonal whiplash between high-stakes espionage and mandatory song breaks, but Force 2 doesn't even have a catchy tune to justify the narrative speed bump, giving us instead a forgettable club remix that sounds like three other tracks playing simultaneously.

The ideological underpinnings of the plot are messy in a way that feels increasingly common in modern patriotic cinema, where real-world geopolitical tragedies are treated like raw material for a star vehicle's righteous fistfights. The story hinges on the plight of forgotten intelligence agents whose identities are scrubbed by the state when missions go sideways, a genuinely compelling premise that gets buried beneath mountains of dialogue about national honor and bullet casings. Abraham's character ACP Yashvardhan is supposed to be the embodiment of unyielding duty, but the movie makes him so humorless and rigid that his crusade stops feeling like a personal vendetta and starts feeling like an administrative compliance audit with high-velocity consequences. He glares at politicians. He stares out rain-streaked car windows. He holds heavy objects while flexing his forearms.

There is a supporting turn from a senior actor playing a shadowy intelligence director who is clearly dubbed by someone else in a recording booth with zero acoustic treatment, resulting in dialogue audio that floats completely detached from the physical space of the office, echoing as if he is speaking from inside an empty water tank. It is a minor technical botch, sure, but it pulls you right out of the illusion every time he starts chewing out our heroes for going rogue in Budapest. These are the kinds of rough edges that populate mid-tier commercial cinema when the post-production schedule is squeezed to make room for a festive release window, leaving glaring continuity errors and mismatched audio tracks sitting right there on the screen for anyone paying attention.

What keeps this from being a total disaster is the sheer, pig-headed commitment of its leading man, who throws his entire bulk into stunts that would have sent a stunt double to physical therapy for a month, including a genuinely impressive sequence where he leaps between moving vehicles. He doesn't have the sly comedic timing of vintage action heroes, nor does he possess the internal gravity of a dramatic actor, but he has a singular, monolithic screen presence that anchors the chaos just enough to keep you from checking your watch every ten minutes. When he finally corners the villain in a cramped utility tunnel for the obligatory bare-knuckle showdown, the movie drops the geopolitical hand-wringing and just lets two sweaty men punch each other until one of them falls down, which is honestly all the narrative closure this bloated machinery ever needed.

The film wraps up not with a grand thematic statement on the cost of patriotism or the ethics of state-sanctioned wet-work, but with a sullen voiceover about nameless heroes who die in the shadows, spoken in that sonorous, gravelly register Abraham uses when he wants you to know he is feeling very serious things. Then the credits roll over a montage of real-world intelligence personnel, a heavy-handed touch that feels entirely unearned after two hours of cartoonish car chases and implausible rooftop parkour. It isn't a terrible afternoon at the multiplex if your standards for cinematic espionage are low enough to accept stock footage of Berlin standing in for twenty different Eastern European cities, but it leaves behind the dull, ringing headache of a movie that wanted to say something important and settled instead for shouting very loudly in a small room.