That specific shade of greasepaint under the harsh fluorescents of an interrogation room always looks cheap, even when the budget is there. Ram Gopal Varma has made better pictures about men who kill for a living, and if I'm honest, he has also made far worse ones that barely warrant a mention over morning coffee. This one sits somewhere in the messy middle where a veteran filmmaker tries to recapture a feral energy that left him years ago. Veerappan isn't a documentary, though it desperately wants the gritty, sweat-stained authority of one. It leans heavily on the mythology of India's most notorious sandalwood smuggler while attempting to strip away the folk-hero sheen that the Tamil and Kannada press spent decades constructing. You get forests that look less like a lush wildlife sanctuary and more like a purgatorial maze shot through a muddy green filter.

Ram Gopal Varma directs with a hyperactive visual grammar that abandoned narrative patience long ago. The screenplay by K. Kiran Kumar cobbles together police files, informant gossip, and journalistic sensationalism into something resembling a chase movie, yet it constantly loses its breath. We jump between the operational war room where officers hatch elaborate plans and the dense thickets where the bandit moves like a ghost. But the staging lacks spatial geography. You never quite know where anyone is standing relative to anyone else, which might be a deliberate attempt to mimic the disorientation of jungle warfare or just plain sloppy coverage. Characters bark exposition over crackling walkie-talkies while the camera zooms frantically into their sweat-beaded nostrils. It gets exhausting very quickly, a relentless sensory assault that forgets the power of a still frame. There is an edit during a tense standoff near a dry riverbed where the cut lingers a fraction of a second too long on a junior officer blinking in confusion, draining the tension completely out of the frame.

Sandeep Bharadwaj shoulders the title role with an animalistic intensity that keeps the enterprise from completely drifting away. His Veerappan isn't a charismatic revolutionary or a misunderstood subaltern rebelling against state oppression. He is a paranoid, brutal creature who communicates mostly in snarls and sudden bursts of violence. The prosthetic mustache and heavy brow sometimes restrict his expressions, forcing him to rely entirely on his wide, unblinking eyes to convey menace. It is a physical performance first and foremost, reminiscent of Manoj Bajpayee in Satya without the tragic depth that made that older character resonate long after the credits rolled. Bharadwaj sprints through thick underbrush, skins an animal with terrifying casualness, and glares at his hostages with absolute contempt.

Opposite him, Sachiin J Joshi plays the composite intelligence officer leading Operation Cocoon with the stoic weariness of a man who has not slept in a week. Joshi wears a permanent scowl and delivers his lines with a low, gravelly register that occasionally dips into unintelligibility. He is surrounded by a supporting cast that includes Usha Jadhav as the bandit’s fiercely loyal wife and Lisa Ray as an undercover agent whose presence strains credibility even within this heightened genre. Usha Jadhav does remarkable work with very little dialogue, anchoring the domestic horror of living under constant siege by a tyrannical husband who treats his own household like a military camp. Lisa Ray, on the other hand, struggles to find her footing in a Hindi film environment that often treats non-native speakers as window dressing, and her dubbed voice track never quite matches the shape of her syllables.

The technical package leans hard into digital ugliness as a substitute for authenticity. Cinematographer Aniket Khandagale shoots almost exclusively with wide-angle lenses shoved uncomfortably close to the actors' faces, warping their features and turning the jungle into a smear of digital grain. The soundtrack relies on a recurring percussive tribal beat that hits every single time a character contemplates violence, which means you hear the exact same drumming cue twenty-four times before the intermission. It's a small thing that bugged me, like an editor's tic that nobody bothered to iron out during the final mix. John Abraham might have brought a different kind of box-office muscle to the procedural elements, but Joshi plays it straight as an arrow, giving the manhunt a grim procedural cadence.

Beneath the surface-level machismo and the endless gunfights, the film engages with the moral rot of state machinery. The police force is depicted as just as corrupt, ruthless, and opportunistic as the man they are hunting, deploying extrajudicial torture and civilian intimidation with casual bureaucratic efficiency. This cynicism prevents the narrative from turning into a standard good-versus-evil morality play, even if the execution lacks the intellectual sharpness required to make that critique bite. When the state finally corners its prey, there is no catharsis. Just dirt, blood, and the sinking realization that another monster will simply step into the vacuum left by the fallen one.

Veerappan ultimately collapses under the weight of its own stylistic tics and repetitive editing choices. You leave the theater with a ringing in your ears and a mild headache from the relentless camera movement. It is a grueling watch that occasionally flashes with genuine cinematic grit before retreating into cheap digital tricks. The performances hold the center together against mounting odds, proving that a dedicated cast can survive almost any amount of directorial over-indulgence. There is a better movie buried somewhere in this footage, perhaps one with fewer zoom lenses and a bit more narrative silence.