The sound mix on the police radios in the first twenty minutes of Shoot Out At Lokhandwala is genuinely grating. If I'm honest, it sounds like somebody crumpled a chip bag right next to a cheap microphone and left it in the master track. That audio crunch sets a tone of low-budget desperation that Apoorva Lakhia manages to sustain for nearly two and a half hours, even when the budget clearly opens up and the helicopters start circling.

Based on a real 1991 daylight shootout in a crowded Mumbai apartment complex, the movie treats history like a suggestion box. Lakhia and his co-writer Suresh Nair stage the carnage with a frantic energy that owes a heavy debt to Michael Mann's Heat, though without the spatial geography or the patience. Bullets punch through concrete, plaster turns into smoke, and people yell things that get swallowed by the heavy metal score. The screenplay structures itself around a judicial inquiry led by Amitabh Bachchan's cold-eyed bureaucrat, which mostly serves as an excuse to jump backward into excessive, slow-motion flashbacks of gangsters smoking cigarettes and looking menacing.

Sanjay Dutt plays ACP Shamsher Khan with the weary, heavy-lidded exhaustion of a man who has played this exact cop in ten other Hindi films and would rather be asleep. He doesn't stretch. He doesn't need to. He just stands in doorways and looks big. Viveik Anand Oberoi, on the other hand, is working overtime as the psychotic gang leader Maya, chewing on every piece of scenery within arm's reach and occasionally delivering dialogue with a bizarre, trembling cadence that suggests his character is either coming down from something heavy or just really cold. The rest of the sprawling cast—Tusshar Kapoor, Arbaaz Khan, Rohit Roy, Sammir Dattani, Shabbir Aluwalia—largely blur together into a homogeneous mass of leather jackets, aviator sunglasses, and stubble. They run through alleys and fire automatic weapons sideways, which looks cool for about four minutes before the repetition sets in.

The cinematography by Govind Menon loves a high-contrast orange filter and a camera that cannot stay still for more than three seconds. Every conversation is shot from a low angle or through a revolving ceiling fan, a stylistic tic that makes a simple exchange about jurisdiction look like a music video for a nu-metal band that broke up in 2003. When the violence finally erupts in the second half—the actual siege that takes up forty unbroken minutes of screen time—the editing becomes so hyperactive that it is genuinely impossible to tell who is shooting at whom, or which building they are currently standing inside of. It captures the chaos of urban combat, sure, but it also captures the feeling of someone shaking a snow globe filled with broken glass and loud noises.

Underneath all the machismo and the deafening gunfights, the movie has a weirdly conservative view of law enforcement accountability. The inquiry framing device acts as a rubber stamp for extrajudicial execution, presenting police brutality not as a systemic failure but as an unfortunate necessity when dealing with young men who wear nice shirts and listen to loud music. It never pauses to interrogate the reality of police corruption in Mumbai during that era. It just wants to get back to the next squib hit.

Still, there is a strange, messy vitality to the whole enterprise that keeps it from feeling entirely dead on arrival. It moves fast enough that you don't have time to dwell on how thin the character motivations are, or why everyone in the underworld seems to spend all their time hanging out in poorly lit pool halls. It is loud, obnoxious, and occasionally thrilling in the way only middle-tier action cinema can be. Even if that sound effect on the police radio keeps happening every time someone yells over a walkie-talkie.