Katrina Kaif spends roughly forty percent of this movie wearing outfits that appear to have been assembled by an algorithm designed to maximize friction with physics, and I am not entirely sure why anyone thought a circus acrobat needs a wardrobe that looks like a high-end lingerie catalogue designed for a Bond villain who hates joy. It's a small thing, but it bugged me every single time she dropped from a trapeze while looking like she just stepped out of a Paris fashion week afterparty with zero regard for the fact that she is supposed to be working in a struggling Chicago circus run by Jackie Shroff. You get the sense that the styling department received an unlimited budget and a strict mandate to ensure no single frame ever looked like it belonged in the same hemisphere as actual grit or poverty, which is a weird aesthetic choice for a film about bank heists and working-class desperation. There is a sheen over everything that makes even the damp alleys of Chicago look like they were scrubned down with Lemon Pledge twenty minutes before the cameras rolled, though maybe that's just what happens when a massive production rolls into town with a fleet of expensive toys and nowhere to put them except on the screen.

Director Vijay Krishna Acharya has this habit of staging action sequences as if he is terrified the audience might look away from the shiny objects for even a fraction of a second, cutting between angles so fast you sometimes forget who is driving the motorcycle or which direction the river is flowing. It feels less like a chase and more like a collection of expensive music videos stitched together with digital duct tape and loud bass drops that rattle the popcorn tubs in the back row. Abhishek Bachchan tries his best to anchor this chaos as Jai Dixit, the brooding cop who is perpetually one step behind the criminals because he spends half his screen time glaring into the middle distance while Uday Chopra’s Ali bumbles around making jokes that died of old age somewhere around the release of the first installment in this franchise. Abhishek has this specific exhausted slouch in his shoulders that tells you he knows the script is stretching credibility thinner than a dry noodle, yet he keeps pushing forward anyway, dragging the narrative along by its collar even when the physics-defying bike stunts start looking like rejected storyboards from Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol.

Aamir Khan plays the dual roles of Sahir and Samar, twins with a tragic backstory involving their father's suicide after a ruthless bank foreclosure, and he plays them with the sort of intense, vein-bulging commitment that usually wins awards or scares small children at birthday parties. When he is doing the silent, brooding acrobat routine, he is mildly compelling, but the minute he has to emote about family betrayal or childhood trauma, the performance gets thick and heavy, like a winter coat worn in July. He spends a lot of time staring intently into mirrors and working out on gymnastic rings with his shirt off, which is undoubtedly going to sell a lot of gym memberships in Mumbai, but it doesn't leave much room for actual human interaction. Hindi films have a long and storied history of melodramatic twin tropes, going all the way back to Ram Aur Shyam, but usually those movies understood the assignment was to have fun with the confusion instead of treating a circus robbery as if it were an existential crisis on par with The Godfather Part II. Here, every single heist is treated with the gravity of a geopolitical summit, complete with slow-motion walks away from explosions that refuse to singe a single hair on anybody's head.

The soundtrack by Pritam does the heavy lifting when the narrative sags under the weight of its own plot holes, pumping out infectious dance tracks that make you forget for three minutes that the twins' master plan involves hacking a Swiss bank using a laptop that has clearly never been connected to an actual internet router. Katrina gets her big musical numbers where she shakes off the acrobat persona and transforms into a pop star with backup dancers who materialize out of thin air, a Bollywood trope that defies geography but works because the sheer kinetic energy on display distracts from the gaping logic chasms. The cinematography by S. Ravi Varman loves high angles and saturated blues, painting Chicago as a neon-soaked playground where cops can completely shut down major intersections just so two guys on dirt bikes can leap over a police barricade into Lake Michigan without getting a single parking ticket. You start to wonder if anyone involved in the production ever visited the Midwest or if they just studied old postcards and episodes of ER before designing the sets.

Thematic ambitions in blockbusters often crash and burn against the rocks of commercial necessity, and this movie is no exception, trying to mash up a gritty revenge thriller with a family drama about brotherhood and loyalty while keeping the PG-13 sheen intact. When the tragic backstory finally gets unveiled in full, it hits with all the subtlety of a falling grand piano, turning what should have been a clever cat-and-mouse game into a sluggish psychological study that doesn't quite trust its audience to connect the dots without a massive flashback. Uday Chopra pops up every twenty minutes to remind us we are watching a franchise entry rather than a standalone story, functioning primarily as a human speed bump who interrupts the tension with mild slapstick that lands with a dull thud. By the time the final confrontation rolls around on a massive suspension bridge with trains and motorcycles dodging each other in a chaotic ballet of computer-generated pixels, you stop caring about the logistics of the twins' revenge and just hope the stunt coordinators survived the shoot.

There is a mechanical stiffness to the pacing that keeps you at arm's length, preventing any real emotional investment in whether the cops catch the bad guys or if the circus manages to pay off its mortgage to the evil bankers. It is a loud, shiny object of a movie that costs a fortune and looks every bit of it, yet leaves behind the emotional resonance of a screensaver on a loop. Abhishek Bachchan gives it an honest try, and Aamir Khan sweats through his routines with admirable dedication, but neither of them can rescue a script that treats logic as an optional suggestion rather than a rule. You walk out of the theater feeling neither angry nor amazed, just mildly deafened by the sound design and slightly confused by how a circus in Chicago managed to afford such an enormous fleet of custom-modified superbikes without ever selling a single ticket to an actual spectator.