Vibe
Synopsis:
Bhagirath Bhargav, known as Bugs, asks his boss for time off to welcome his best friend Hardik Sharma, who returns home after completing a stint in drug rehabilitation. Bugs tries to help Hardik get his life back on track by securing him a job at his tech company. Hardik spots a company intern named Kareena and falls in love with her, asking her out on a date despite warnings from Bugs. Following this date, Indian secret agents detain Hardik due to an alleged connection to a terrorist network. Madam H receives intelligence indicating that Kareena is actually Huma Sayeed, whose family members maintain ties to terrorism. Rather than treating Hardik as an accomplice, Madam H gives him an opportunity to prove his innocence. During the operation, Kareena, also known as Huma, dies in an explosion. Her brother invites Hardik and Bugs to travel to Thailand for her funeral. Upon arrival in Thailand, new mysteries emerge, pulling Hardik and Bugs into a chaotic series of events involving an international gang. Madam H works to establish a new agency named the Vigorous Intelligence Bureau of Execution while dealing with the security threats and the involvement of the two unprepared friends.
The sound design introduces a ticking pocket watch over a black screen before a subtitle card misidentifies a quiet suburb as downtown Baku. It is a small error, but it sets the tone for an enterprise that cannot quite be bothered to check its own geography. When the camera finally cuts to Kunal Kemmu staring blankly at a half-eaten sandwich, the narrative engine sputters into motion with a reluctant cough. Not great, not bad, just there, idling in neutral while everyone waits to see if anything interesting is going to happen.
Kunal Kemmu directs with the frantic energy of someone who watched too many Guy Ritchie imports during lockdown and forgot that rhythm requires silence between the noise. The screenplay lurches forward on a series of forced misunderstandings and coincidences that stretch credibility past the snapping point. Scenes start midway through a loud argument and end on abrupt punchlines that miss their target by a clear yard. Characters run down narrow corridors because the blocking demands motion, shouting dialogue that sounds like it was punched up by committee in a greenroom. There is little spatial awareness in the editing room, leaving action sequences to blur into a gray soup of rapid-fire cuts where geography dissolves entirely.
Preity G Zinta strides through this mess with an aggressive, neon-lit charisma that feels imported from an entirely different movie. She plays her commanding operative with sharp sunglasses and a perpetual smirk, treating every line delivery like a private joke shared with the boom operator. Opposite her, Kunal Kemmu and Sparsh Shrivastava attempt to build an odd-couple rapport out of thin air. Kemmu leans hard into his familiar slacker persona, shrugging through life-or-death scenarios with the weary resignation of an unpaid intern stuck late at the office. Shrivastava tries to ground the nonsense with wide-eyed sincerity, playing the nervous straight man to a fault. They bounce off each other with variable success, occasionally finding a genuine spark of comic friction before another loud explosion resets the dynamic back to zero.
Kaushal Shah turns the cinematography into a showcase for saturated primary colors that bleed into every shadow. Neon blues and hot pinks wash over dingy warehouses until every safehouse looks like a hipster coffee shop downtown. Amit Trivedi provides a soundtrack that pounds away at your eardrums with relentless enthusiasm, though a particular brass-heavy theme repeats so often during minor conversation scenes that it starts to feel like an auditory trap. It is a small thing, but hearing that exact same four-note sting accompany every single reaction shot wears thin long before the intermission arrives.
Hindi films have long wrestled with the delicate balance between high-concept espionage and low-brow farce, often tipping over into chaotic self-indulgence. This project tries to emulate the breezy structural chaos of something like *Go Goa Gone*, but it lacks the anarchic conviction that made that earlier picture click. Instead of leaning fully into the absurdity, the narrative keeps pausing to explain its own jokes through heavy exposition dumps delivered by supporting actors standing awkwardly in doorways. The thematic ambitions gesture vaguely toward modern surveillance culture and bureaucratic incompetence, yet these ideas evaporate the moment a villain pulls out a flame thrower for no discernible reason.
Watching these performers navigate the paper-thin material brings to mind the weary professionalism seen in mid-period Hollywood action comedies where everyone onscreen looks like they are calculating their contract renewal dates between takes. The tonal shifts are jarring, swinging wildly from broad slapstick involving malfunctioning gadgets to sudden bursts of graphic violence that clash with the PG-13 goofiness. By avoiding any genuine emotional stakes, the story traps its cast in a holding pattern of perpetual quips.
There is an exhausting insistence on being clever that drains the air out of the room. Every setup is broadcast ten minutes in advance, turning narrative surprises into mathematical certainties. Hindi movies work best when they surrender to their own excesses or anchor themselves in distinct emotional truths, but this middle-ground compromise satisfies neither impulse. The actors work overtime to sell lines that deserve a quick deletion, sweating through elaborate set-pieces that lead straight back to where they started.
What remains is a hollowed-out shell of a genre exercise, moving through familiar beats without a drop of genuine spontaneity. The production values are slick enough to keep your eyes from wandering, but the script offers nothing for the mind to latch onto once the lights come back up. It drifts across the screen like background noise at a crowded cafe, easily ignored and entirely forgettable.