That specific blue tint in the night-exterior sequences of Abbas-Mustan thrillers always looks like someone spilled ink across the lens, and Khiladi starts off swimming in it. Deepak Tijori is already sweating through a pastel windbreaker when the first reel kicks in, leaning against a convertible that probably belonged to the production manager's cousin. It is a small thing but it bugged me how the boom mic dips right into frame during the third establishing shot of the college gate, hanging there like an accidental pendulum while characters yell dialogue about semester exams. Hindi films from the early nineties rarely bothered with safety takes when the sunlight was dying on location, so you take the swinging shadow and move on. Nobody involved in putting this together suspected they were architecting a blueprint for a whole decade of star vehicles. They just wanted to finish the chase scene before the campus police shut down the quad.

Abbas and Mustan Burmawalla shoot everything with the frantic energy of guys who just discovered a new zoom lens in the rental locker and decided to point it at every single face in the room. Their direction relies heavily on Dutch angles during conversations that should probably be shot flat and straight, creating an unnecessary sense of vertigo while two actors talk about a missing ledger or a skipped lecture. The screenplay, credited to the duo working from a plot that feels structurally similar to Deewana though with half the budget and twice the leather jackets, moves between comedy tracks and blackmail plots with dizzying abruptness. One minute we are watching Johnny Lever do a routine involving an oversized stethoscope and a rubber reflex hammer that goes on for four agonizing minutes, and the next we are knee-deep in a murder mystery involving a body falling off a balcony in slow motion. The tonal whiplash is constant. The filmmakers never met a reflective surface they didn't want to place behind an actor's head, filling every frame with glass partitions, chrome railings, and puddles of water on marble floors.

Akshay Kumar plays Raj Malhotra with the kind of chaotic, unpolished swagger that disappeared the moment he learned how to pose for posters on the correct side. He isn't the martial arts machine yet, just a guy with broad shoulders, questionable knitwear, and an easy grin who looks like he might try to sell you a used scooter in the parking lot. His chemistry with Ayesha Jhulka, who plays Neelam Choudhry with a permanent look of mild exhaustion, works purely because they both look slightly confused about why the plot requires them to be hiding in a deserted warehouse at two in the morning. Ayesha Jhulka has this habit of blinking rapidly whenever she delivers an emotional line, which somehow makes her character feel more real than the ridiculous noir tropes swirling around her feet. Then you have Prem Chopra, chewing scenery that wasn't even built yet, deploying his standard menacing chuckle whenever he enters a wood-paneled office to threaten someone about an inheritance.

The supporting players are a mixed bag of working-class character actors who clearly spent their per diems on local snacks between setups. Sharat Saxena shows up as a heavy with a mustache that appears to have its own weather system, though his voice is dubbed by someone who sounds like they recorded their lines inside a steel drum with a wet microphone. Anant Mahadevan brings a frantic, nervous energy to his role as the compromised professor, sweating through his tie in a way that suggests the costume department only brought one shirt for the entire three-day schedule. Then there is Deepak Tijori, whose entire performance consists of looking betrayed while wearing sleeveless denim vests that expose shoulders tanned the exact color of walnut furniture. They all run around through identical-looking stairwells and campus corridors that must have been standing sets at Mehboob Studio, giving the whole affair the cozy, claustrophobic feel of a high-school play mounted by people who watched too many imported VHS tapes.

Viju Shah's soundtrack hits the ground running with synthesizer presets that sound like they were pulled straight from a Casio keyboard left out in the rain, but you cannot get those hooks out of your head once the credits roll. The background score drops these heavy, thumping bass notes whenever a character looks suspiciously at a telephone, signaling tension with all the subtlety of a falling anvil. It is loud. It is brassy. It uses the same four-note suspense motif approximately eighty-two times before the intermission hits, and yet it anchors the nonsense happening on screen with a weird, hypnotic rhythm. Cinematographer Akram Khan keeps the camera moving in circles around the actors during romantic duets, capturing choreography that looks like it was improvised in the parking lot five minutes before the cameras rolled. The lighting design changes color temperatures mid-scene without any narrative justification, bathing characters in violent magenta because it looked cool on the monitor.

Hindi movies of this vintage often get retroactively draped in irony by audiences who grew up on slicker stuff, but Khiladi retains an earnest, sloppy charm that resists easy mockery. It is not great, not bad, just there, taking up ninety minutes of your afternoon with car chases that top out at forty miles per hour and fistfights where the stuntmen fall over before the punch actually connects. The thematic underpinnings are practically nonexistent, resting entirely on the notion that rich kids are generally untrustworthy and middle-class heroes will eventually win the girl by running really fast across a cricket field. When you compare it to something like Baazigar, which came out the following year and figured out how to make this exact same thriller formula actually lethal, this movie looks like a rough draft scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt. Yet that roughness is precisely the point. The seams are frayed. The dubbing is out of sync by three full frames during the emotional climax in the hospital. The sound design drops dialogue tracks completely during wide shots because the boom operator lost his grip. You leave the viewing not with a profound appreciation for the genre, but with the distinct impression that everyone on set had a sandwich waiting for them as soon as the director yelled cut.