The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Wazir features a gunshot that somehow sounds like a car door slamming in a damp multistory parking lot, which is a weird choice for an action thriller that wants you to take its tactical units seriously from the first frame. You sit there in the dark wondering if the mix is off or if the theater has blown a tweeter, and before you can decide, Farhan Akhtar is already running through a crowded Delhi underpass looking slightly more tired than a grieving ATS officer ought to look.

Bejoy Nambiar directs with this relentless, choppy energy that usually works better in music videos than it does when you are trying to untangle a conspiracy involving the murder of a child, the Prime Minister, and a subterranean chess match played with real people. He cuts away from dialogue scenes just as they are getting interesting, chopping the air out of the room so nobody has a chance to settle into their character's skin. It is a very busy movie. Every transition comes with a heavy bass thud and a flash of geometric graphic design that feels cribbed from a mid-tier console game, and if I'm honest, it starts to give you a bit of a headache after the fourth or fifth foot chase.

Farhan is playing Danish Ali, a man whose life has gone sideways after a stray bullet kills his daughter and leaves his marriage in shards, and he wears the same heavy, hunted expression through nearly every single scene. He does not have much room to move because the script, written by Abhijat Joshi and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, keeps him locked in this tight orbit of misery and vengeance. When he meets Pandit Omkar Nath Dhar, played by Amitabh Bachchan as an eccentric, wheelchair-bound chess grandmaster who teaches blind children and drinks tea out of fragile porcelain cups, the film briefly finds its footing. Bachchan brings this old-school theatrical authority to the material that anchors the whole enterprise. He has a way of pausing for just a beat too long before delivering a line about sacrifice or strategy, and it makes you forget that the plot mechanics holding the scene together are roughly as sturdy as wet cardboard.

Aditi Rao Hydari shows up as Pandit’s former student and proxy daughter, and she spends most of her screen time looking luminous and slightly bewildered by the narrative gymnastics happening around her. She has this breathy, earnest delivery that fits the tone of a tragic romantic subplot borrowed from a different, softer decade of Hindi films. The chemistry between her and Farhan feels rushed, like a series of Instagram stills stitched together with some sad piano chords, but they manage to generate a little bit of genuine warmth before the thriller machinery kicks back in and demands someone get kidnapped or shot at. Neil Nitin Mukesh pops up in a cameo as the titular villain, all slicked hair and menacing smirks, though he is barely on screen long enough to make an impression before the third-act twist turns everything inside out.

Then there is John Abraham, who enters the frame halfway through as another military guy with a prosthetic leg and a very large gun, stomping around like he wandered off the set of Madras Cafe to do a favor for a friend. John is fine, but his dialogue sounds like it was translated from an English action paperback using an app from 2011, and he delivers his exposition with the dead-eyed efficiency of a man who just wants to get to his trailer. It is a small thing, but the sound effect used every time his mechanical leg hits a linoleum floor is distractingly loud, like someone dropping a toolbox behind the curtain during a quiet dramatic monologue.

The cinematography by Ezra Spann uses a lot of deep blues and charcoal grays, making Delhi look less like a real city and more like a moody concept board for an unmade video game adaptation. Shantanu Moitra’s score tries to do the heavy lifting that the editing refuses to allow, leaning hard on mournful cello lines and pulsing synth beats whenever the emotional temperature threatens to drop below freezing. You can see the gears turning in every scene. The film wants to be a smart, chess-based cat-and-mouse game in the vein of David Fincher's The Game, but it lacks the patience to let its characters breathe, preferring instead to rush from one plot point to the next with breathless urgency.

The central conceit of the film relies on the idea that life is like a game of chess where every move is predetermined by some unseen grandmaster sitting in the dark, which is a neat metaphor for a commercial thriller until you start looking at the logic holding the board together. Big Bollywood movies often struggle to balance high-concept genre tropes with grounded emotional stakes, and Wazir falls directly into that trap, giving us grand speeches about destiny while the actual police work looks like it was researched by someone who only watches television procedurals on mute. The political intrigue feels weightless because we never really understand what is at stake beyond the personal grief of the two lead men, turning a potentially complex conspiracy into a standard revenge melodrama with extra coats of visual polish.

When the big reveal hits in the final twenty minutes, it recontextualizes everything that came before it in a way that is either clever or deeply frustrating, depending on how much patience you have left for narrative sleight-of-hand. Some viewers will applaud the audacity of the switcheroo. Others will feel like they just sat through a two-hour magic trick where the magician accidentally dropped the rabbit on the floor halfway through the routine. It is neither a disaster nor a triumph, sitting comfortably in that vast, gray middle ground where so many mid-budget Hindi movies live and die.

Amitabh’s performance stays with you long after the credits roll, mostly because he is the only person on screen who seems to understand how to play the emotional beats without winking at the camera. He gives the film a gravity it hasn't earned, pulling against the choppy editing and the heavy-handed symbolism until you almost believe that the game he is playing has real consequences.

The last shot lingers on a chessboard in an empty room, and as the lights come up, you are left thinking about how much better this could have been if everyone involved had just slowed down by about ten percent.