Paresh Rawal has this tic in the first half where he keeps adjusting his glasses while looking at satellite feeds, and if I'm honest, it distracted me every single time. It is a small thing, sure, but when you are watching a geopolitical thriller about the 2016 Uri attacks, you want your National Security Advisor to look like he is actually sleeping four hours a night instead of running through a checklist of institutional mannerisms borrowed from every political drama made since the turn of the century. Still, Aditya Dhar's directorial debut cuts through a lot of standard-issue cinematic bloat with a strange, relentless energy that keeps dragging you back to the screen even when the dialogue sounds like it was generated by an algorithm designed to maximize chest-thumping nationalism in a crowded theater. Hindi films have tried this particular brand of tactical hyper-realism before, usually with the clumsy, over-caffeinated swagger of movies like *Baby*, but Dhar actually understands how to shoot men standing in damp rooms arguing about logistics without making the entire exercise feel like a recruitment ad for the territorial army.

Vicky Kaushal plays Major Vihaan Singh Shergill with a kind of suppressed fury that rarely boils over into shouting, which feels entirely correct for a man whose knees are giving out and whose mother is sliding deeper into Alzheimer's while he is supposed to be planning cross-border incursions. His performance relies almost entirely on posture and gaze rather than grand, sweeping monologues about duty, meaning he can stand in the background of a briefing room while everyone else is chewing the scenery and still dominate the visual frame purely through the stiffness of his shoulders. Yami Gautam shows up as an intelligence officer who operates mostly in starkly lit command bunkers, and while she doesn't get much room to develop an inner life outside of pointing at glowing red dots on topographical maps, she manages to avoid the trap of playing the token female professional who has to prove her toughness by shouting down her superiors. The supporting cast is packed with reliable faces doing standard-issue military grit, though there is a weird recurring issue with post-production audio dubbing on some of the junior officers that makes their frantic radio chatter sound like it was recorded in a carpeted closet rather than the middle of a dense jungle firefight.

Cinematographer Mitesh Mirchandani shoots the nighttime raids using a greenish, thermal-imaging palette that avoids the muddy confusion of similar action sequences in recent Hindi movies, giving the audience just enough geographical clarity to understand who is breaching which concrete bunker and when. The soundtrack relies heavily on low-frequency drone sounds and pounding percussion that occasionally threatens to drown out the actors entirely, though there is one specific sequence where the music drops out completely just as the first flashbang goes off, leaving only the sharp crack of suppressed automatic rifles and the heavy breathing of men crawling through high grass in total darkness. Dhar structures the narrative in distinct chapters that map out the political escalation, the bureaucratic hand-wringing, and the eventual tactical retaliation with clinical efficiency, refusing to linger too long on domestic melodrama or emotional hand-wringing about the cost of war. Whenever the film threatens to tilt over into pure propaganda, Kaushal anchors it with a tired, hollow-eyed stare that reminds you of the human cost involved in turning real-world tragedies into slick, fast-paced entertainment for Friday night audiences.

There is an inherent ideological strain running through the whole enterprise that you simply cannot ignore, because this is a movie made in a specific political climate where popular cinema and state-sanctioned narratives are increasingly speaking the exact same language. Yet, unlike so many recent bollywood movies that substitute genuine tension for loud, aggressive sermonizing from the pulpit of CGI-heavy spectacle, this one respects the mechanics of suspense enough to let the operational details breathe on their own terms. The dialogue relies too often on clunky exposition when the actors could just be looking at a map, but the pacing moves fast enough that you rarely have time to dwell on the clumsy political subtext before the next helicopter takes off. Even the villains across the border are granted a baseline of tactical competence instead of being reduced to cardboard cutouts, which makes the eventual strike feel hard-won rather than like a foregone conclusion written by politicians who have never slept in a trench.

When the final chopper lands back at base and the survivors step out into the grey morning light, there is no sweeping orchestral swell to tell you how to feel about the geopolitics you just spent two and a half hours absorbing, just a tired nod between two men who know the cycle is going to start all over again tomorrow morning. It is an uneven piece of work that stumbles whenever it tries to articulate a broader national philosophy, but it functions with a mechanical precision that puts most other contemporary action cinema to shame. Kaushal carries the weight of the entire production on his back without ever dropping his guard or resorting to easy emotional catharsis, leaving you with the distinct impression of a man who would rather be anywhere else in the world than standing in front of a bank of glowing monitors explaining how to kill people in the dark.