Salman Khan wears a mesh undershirt under a leather vest while firing a rocket launcher at a helicopter that is hovering roughly twelve feet above a desert floor, and if I am honest, that image tells you everything and nothing about how the next two and a half hours are going to go. We are well past the point where logic matters in mainstream Hindi cinema, sure, but Race 3 takes that cinematic lawlessness and coats it in twenty weight motor oil. It is loud. It is shiny. It makes you wonder if the editing bay ran on pure instinct and Red Bull.

Director Remo D'Souza previously handled dance films where the camera swoops in to catch a pirouette, and he brings that exact same hyperactive, movement obsessed lens to a crime thriller about a deeply dysfunctional family of arms dealers fighting over a flash drive that contains codes to something or other. The screenplay, credited to Shiraz Ahmed, feels constructed entirely out of aggressive dad jokes and plot twists that arrive with the subtlety of a falling safe. Characters betray each other every twelve minutes, though nobody ever seems particularly upset about it. They just pout for a second, adjust their sunglasses, and plan the next revenge sequence. It moves so fast you do not have time to realize how empty the plot actually is, which might be a deliberate strategy or might just be what happens when nobody on set bothers to read the second half of the draft. There are scenes where people talk about family loyalty while standing in front of sports cars that cost more than my apartment building, and nobody in the frame looks like they belong in the same room.

Salman plays Sikander, the adopted older brother who handles the family's dirty work with the emotional range of a very expensive department store mannequin. He is meant to be the stoic, unstoppable force at the center of the chaos, but he mostly just walks slowly through explosions and lets his posture do the heavy lifting. Anil Kapoor, returning from earlier entries in the franchise, plays Shamsher Singh, the patriarch who rules his criminal empire with a cigar clamped firmly between his teeth and a tailored suit that never gets a speck of dust on it even during intense vehicular shootouts. Kapoor is clearly having a better time than anyone else on the payroll, chewing scenery like it is made of cotton candy and delivering lines about blood relatives with a straight face that borders on heroic. Jacqueline Fernandez plays Jessica, whose primary dramatic function involves wearing red dresses, doing high kicks in slow motion, and occasionally whispering exposition into a Bluetooth earpiece. The chemistry between the leads is completely nonexistent, substituting long, brooding stares for actual human connection, which makes their romantic entanglements feel like contracts being signed by strangers in a lobby.

The visual style borrows heavily from the Fast and Furious playbook, except the lighting budget went entirely toward making the chrome on motorcycles look slightly more blue. Cinematographer Ayananka Bose shoots every conversation as if it were a cologne commercial, washing rooms in neon blues and aggressive oranges until every character looks like they have been dipped in sunset. The soundtrack, composed by a rotating committee of hitmakers, blasts into your ears with tracks like Selfish and Party Chale On, functioning less as musical accompaniment and more as an sonic assault designed to wake up anyone who nodded off during the exposition dumps. It is a very shiny movie, full of reflections in sunglasses and glossy surfaces that catch the flash of gunfire. Yet for all visual polish, there is a weirdly cheap quality to the visual effects, particularly in the third act where a fleet of military drones looks like it was rendered on a laptop from 2008 by an intern who wanted to go home early.

It is a small thing, but it bugged me that every single time someone fires a handgun, the sound effect is the exact same generic metallic clack, even when they are shooting a revolver indoors versus an automatic rifle in a gravel pit. Bollywood movies have historically spent millions on sound design, but here it feels like they dragged and dropped a single audio file across forty distinct gunfights. That lack of attention to basic acoustic texture drains the action sequences of any real kinetic weight, turning fights into sterile light shows where people fall down before a bullet even seems to reach them. Even the clothes feel disconnected from the environment, with characters wandering through grimy underground arms bazaars wearing pristine white linen that would get ruined just by looking at the dust.

The underlying theme here is supposedly about the corrosion of familial bonds by greed, a classic Shakespearean setup that has powered countless crime dramas from The Godfather down to local melodramas that play on afternoon television. Except nobody involved in the production seems to care about the tragedy of betrayal because they are too busy figuring out who gets to stand in the center of the frame during the chorus of the next dance number. Characters switch allegiances with the casual ease of changing television channels, rendering the moral stakes completely flat. When Saqib Saleem and Daisy Shah snarl at each other about inheritance rights, it lands with the emotional impact of a dispute over who gets the last slice of pizza in the breakroom. Hindi movies have often leaned into melodrama as a shortcut to audience empathy, but this film strips away the emotion and leaves only the posturing.

There is none of the manic, infectious joy that made a movie like Dhoom 2 work despite its utter disregard for physics. Instead, you get a leaden, self serious slog that treats its own ridiculousness as if it were high art. Salman Khan does not sweat. He does not blink. He just occupies space and waits for the stunt coordinator to tell him where to point his rifle. You leave the theater not feeling angry or exhilarated, just slightly tired, as though you had spent two hours watching someone else play a video game on easy mode.