Mustafa Burmawala stands there on a coastal highway in Georgia, completely soaking wet, wearing a leather jacket that costs more than my first car, and he delivers a line about destiny with all the emotional weight of a guy reading the ingredients off a shampoo bottle. It is the kind of star-launch vehicle that ignores the fact that stars actually need to emit light before you can orbit them. Abbas-Mustan direct this thing, or rather they steer it like an old speedboat with a stuck throttle, careening through hairpins while the passengers clutch the armrests and pray for the reef. You watch it and you think about how far Bollywood has drifted from the slick, sweaty paranoia of their earlier thrillers like Ajnabee, trading actual suspense for forty minutes of drone shots over picturesque European vineyards. Every frame looks dipped in blue food coloring and polished with a microfiber cloth until the grease of actual human presence has been entirely scrubbed away. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise feels less like a motion picture and more like a very expensive screensaver designed to run on a loop in the lobby of a tax consultancy firm in Dubai.

The screenplay behaves like an escape artist who forgot how to pick locks, so it just throws bricks through the glass and calls it a magic trick. Characters show up because the plot needs a fresh corpse or a new alibi, standing in hotel lobbies waiting for someone to yell action while they casually drop exposition about their tragic pasts. Rishabh Arora plays the sort of jealous best friend who looks like he spends four hours a day at the gym and zero hours learning how to modulate his shouting voice when the director calls for intensity. He is loud when he needs to be quiet and he is wooden when the script asks for vulnerability, which creates this strange double-vision effect where you are watching an actor struggle with his blocking while pretending to mourn a tragedy. Then Kiara Advani enters the frame and brings a brief, startled pulse to the proceedings, mostly because she seems acutely aware of how ridiculous the outfits are. She plays Sarah with a kind of glazed diligence, hitting her marks and looking adequately distressed whenever a screeching sports car drifts too close to a cliff edge. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how often the sound design drops her dialogue completely just to let a bass-heavy engine roar rattle the subwoofers in row twelve. We get it, the cars are fast. We can see the speedometer graphic vibrating on the dashboard alongside her panic.

Down in the sound editing bay, somebody clearly fell asleep on the reverb pedal because every single footstep in an empty corridor echoes like a gunshot in an empty cathedral. The soundtrack relies on remixes of old Hindi songs that arrive with the subtlety of a falling anvil, dropping in whenever the momentum stalls out completely, which happens every six to eight minutes. Cinematography by Dilip Verman treats sunlight like an enemy to be avoided at all costs, preferring these hyper-saturated blue tones that make every actor look like they have a mild case of frostbite. You watch these people race through mountain passes in red sports cars that defy every law of physics and common sense, sliding around corners with smoke billowing from the rear tires while the camera swoops in from a helicopter. It is visually exhausting, a relentless barrage of drone shots and slow-motion close-ups of gear shifts that add up to absolutely zero narrative tension. We never feel the danger because the digital grading has rendered everything so clean and plastic that nobody looks like they could actually get a grease stain on their jeans, let alone die in a fiery wreck.

The film wants to be a sleek modern romance that curdles into a twist-heavy revenge saga, but it treats its own genre conventions with a weird sort of weary contempt. It borrows the DNA of Race and shaves off whatever crude energy made those pictures watchable, leaving behind a hollow shell of designer clothes and sunglasses worn indoors after dark. Hindi movies have long relied on the sheer charisma of their leads to carry nonsense plots across the finish line, but here the central trio are treated like coat racks for expensive leather and tailored suits. Mustafa delivers his emotional climaxes with his eyes fixed on a point three inches above the camera lens, looking like he is trying to remember if he left the oven on back at the hotel. You look for a crack in the lacquer, a moment where someone forgets themselves and does something genuinely messy or unpredictable, but the direction stamps out any sign of life with another crane shot or another unnecessary flashback to a beach party. It is a machine in the most literal sense, an industrial process for turning capital and raw material into ninety minutes of flickering blue light that leaves no residue on the memory.

By the time the third-act twists start piling up like abandoned luggage at a regional airport, you have stopped trying to follow the logic of who is double-crossing whom and why anyone cares. The final confrontation takes place in an abandoned industrial warehouse that has been lit with the moody purple glow of a suburban bowling alley, complete with conveniently placed steel chains and wet concrete floors. Mustafa and Rishabh grunt and shove each other around while Kiara looks on from a distance with that same polite, slightly confused expression she wore during the exposition scenes in the first half. It just stops. There is no grand thematic resolution because there was never a theme to begin with, only a series of poses struck against pretty backgrounds until the budget ran out. The credits roll over a final musical number that recycles the worst parts of the score, and you walk out into the lobby feeling like you just spent two hours being yelled at by a very expensive blender.