There is a specific noise Saif Ali Khan makes when he racks the slide of an assault rifle in Kabir Khan’s Phantom, a dry, metallic clack that sounds less like military hardware and more like an office stapler being fed too hard. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened across two and a half hours of geopolitical grievance hunting. We have been here before, sort of, though never quite with this specific brand of tired righteousness that usually gets reserved for direct-to-video action imports starring Gerard Butler. Hindi movies have long struggled to figure out how to stage covert operations without making them look like a Bollywood cousin of Zero Dark Thirty that had its budget halved halfway through prep. You can feel the sweat coming off the production design team trying to turn suburban Mumbai into a London safehouse with the help of some yellow curtains and three extra lamps from IKEA. That kind of shortcut work sets the tone.

Kabir Khan directs with the visual flair of a man who spent his entire adolescence watching trailers on mute while waiting for the bus. He has a habit of shooting conversations between two government officials in damp, poorly lit basements where nobody ever turns on the overhead lights, presumably to hide the fact that the map behind them was printed on glossy poster paper that curls up at the edges. The screenplay, adapted from S. Hussain Zaidi’s book, moves from Chicago to Beirut and back to the badlands of Pakistan with the breathless urgency of an email chain from an uncle who spends too much time on Facebook. It doesn't help that the dialogue sounds like it was run through Google Translate from a completely different political pamphlet and then adjusted for maximum scowling by actors who clearly wished they were somewhere else, anywhere else, eating a sandwich or doing literally anything other than shouting about cross-border terrorism in front of a blue screen.

Saif Ali Khan plays Daniyal Khan, a disgraced former soldier who gets pulled back into the apparatus because the government needs a guy who doesn't exist to kill people who also supposedly don't exist. He wears the exact same leather jacket in every single time zone, whether he is trudging through snow in the mountains or sweating through an alleyway brawl in Syria, which is a wardrobe choice that raises questions about personal hygiene I'd rather not think about. His performance consists almost entirely of walking slowly toward the camera with his chin tucked into his collarbone while background score composers scream brass instruments at your eardrums until you want to chew your own knuckles. He lacks the coiled, feral danger that Nawazuddin Siddiqui brought to Badlapur, that casual cruelty that makes you believe a man could snap a neck in a tight hallway without blinking. Saif just looks mildly inconvenienced by the logistics of international assassination, like a man whose luggage got lost at Heathrow and who is now forced to eliminate high-value targets in his flight socks.

Across from him, Katrina Kaif shows up as Nawaz Mistry, an aid worker whose primary function in the plot appears to be standing next to Saif while looking concerned about explosions that are happening three blocks away. She has this way of widening her eyes whenever a car flips over that suggests she is reacting to bad Wi-Fi rather than an improvised explosive device. It’s not great, not bad, just there, floating through scenes with the detached air of someone who signed a three-film contract during a dinner party and is now reading her lines off a teleprompter taped to the cinematographer's forehead. Rajesh Tailang pops up briefly as a handler, and for about four minutes, you get a glimpse of an actual human being interacting with the absurd plot mechanics before he gets whisked off-screen so we can watch another drone shot of a desert highway that looks like it was downloaded from a stock video site for forty bucks.

The cinematography relies heavily on a desaturated teal-and-orange palette that makes every foreign city look like it’s being viewed through the bottom of a cheap beer bottle found in a drainage ditch. When the action heats up, the editing goes completely haywire, cutting between five different angles of the same punch until you lose all sense of geography, gravity, and basic spatial awareness. Sound design is another casualty here, with every single gunshot accompanied by an identical digital reverb that echoes long after the bullet has hit its target, as if the Foley artist got bored and just hit paste on the audio track forty times. The soundtrack tries desperately to inject some pulse into scenes where two people stand in an empty warehouse talking about jurisdiction, deploying sudden orchestral swells that crash over the dialogue like a wet wave at a public beach.

Underneath all the gunfights and the recycled passport stamps, the film wants to be a hard-headed look at state-sponsored vengeance, a revenge fantasy for an audience that grew up reading newspaper headlines about intelligence failures and wanted a neat, cinematic closure that real life never provides. But it treats its villains as mustache-twirling caricatures who sit in dark rooms plotting the destruction of democracy while stroking their facial hair and talking with ominous pauses between every word. There is no texture to the politics, no messy middle ground where diplomacy actually happens, just a series of high-explosive set pieces designed to flatter the viewer into thinking they are watching something serious about national security. It reduces complex geopolitical trauma into a video game where your character has infinite ammo and the bad guys never check their blind spots.

By the time the closing credits start to roll over a stirring, heavily compressed acoustic guitar version of a patriotic tune, you realize the movie has not actually argued for anything beyond the basic satisfaction of seeing a bad man fall into a trench. It is a loud, forgettable piece of commercial cinema that mistakes noise for substance and geography for character development. Elyas Ahmad turns up in a supporting role as a local fixer and delivers his lines with a stiffness that suggests his teeth were glued together before the take, a small mercy in a film where almost everyone else is shouting at the top of their lungs. The whole thing drifts out of your head about five minutes after the screen goes black, leaving behind nothing except the lingering memory of that cheap stapler sound every time Saif racks his rifle.