Kangana Ranaut’s front teeth look slightly wrong in the wide shots of Rangoon, prosthetic work that never quite settles into the geometry of her jaw, catching the light in that distracting way which makes you spend four whole minutes wondering about dental adhesive in 1943 Burma rather than the Japanese army advancing through the jungle.

Vishal Bhardwaj wanted Casablanca set against the Indian National Army's campaign, which is the kind of pitch that sounds brilliant in a producer’s office over lukewarm green tea and then gets very messy when you actually have to stage three hours of mud, betrayal, and period-accurate cigarettes. The screenplay lurches forward and backward across time with a desperate energy, trading the quiet, rotting claustrophobia that made Omkara so effective for this vast, expensive, CGI-heavy sprawl where nobody quite knows where the horizon is. He keeps losing the plot thread in the tall grass, getting distracted by elaborate musical numbers that halt the narrative dead in its tracks just so Kangana can dance on a train roof in sequins while British officers look confused. If I'm honest, the period detail feels less like a lived-in world and more like an extremely expensive museum diorama where the extras have been told to look sweaty every twenty seconds.

Saif Ali Khan plays Rusi Billimoria, a theatrical producer turned swaggering warlord with a mustache that must have taken three makeup artists to glue down properly, chewing on his lines like they are tough steak he'd rather not swallow. He has this specific, weary arrogance that works wonderfully when he is sitting in a Calcutta mansion drinking scotch, but the film keeps forcing him out into the rain to fire submachine guns, a physical activity he approaches with the polite reluctance of a man being asked to move his own sofa. Shahid Kapoor is almost entirely silent as Nawab Malik, the Indian National Army soldier captured and sent to spy on or protect Julia, depending on which scene you are currently watching. He spends ninety minutes staring into the middle distance with a jawline so sharp it could cut glass, giving us brooding intensity where a character might actually be helpful, reducing a complex historical figure to a series of brooding calendar photos.

Then there is Kangana herself, carrying the whole chaotic machinery on her back like an overloaded ox cart, playing Miss Julia with a screechy, brassy bravado that occasionally dips into something genuinely heartbreaking before she has to jump off another exploding bridge. She is the only reason the love triangle has any pulse at all, because Saif and Shahid have zero chemistry together, glaring at each other across dinner tables with the enthusiasm of two guys waiting for a late bus. She owns the screen whenever she is allowed to just be loud and obnoxious, though the script saddles her with this ridiculous white pigeon that keeps flying around as a symbol of peace or freedom or whatever else the director needed a bird for.

Pankaj Kumar’s cinematography swaps the muddy realism of Haider for a high-contrast gloss that turns every sunset into a postcard for an airline that no longer exists, though there are moments in the swamp scenes where the green gets so aggressively saturated it looks like a cheap screensaver. The soundtrack by Bhardwaj and Vishal Mishra tries to evoke the gramophone era with heavy brass and smoky vocals, but the recurring love theme plays on loop so often during the second hour that you start hearing it in your molars whenever someone opens a door. It's a small thing that bugged me, but every time a character gets shot, there is this weird delay before the Foley artist drops the wet-meat sound effect, just long enough to make you notice the artifice.

Hindi cinema has always struggled with period war epics because the scale required tends to swallow the human beings whole, turning intimate romances into dry logistical exercises about supply lines and jungle retreats. Rangoon falls into that exact trap around the midpoint, abandoning the messy theatrical love story for grand geopolitical statements that feel borrowed from better textbooks. Shahid Kapoor looks a bit like he wandered in from a completely different movie, maybe something directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali where everyone is required to be devastatingly sad about patriotism for two and a half hours.

There is a sequence near the end involving a burning train that goes on for twenty minutes of pure auditory assault, drums pounding and extras screaming while the plot twists itself into a pretzel to ensure nobody gets a happy ending they didn't earn twice over. It lacks the grease and fingernail dirt of classic Bollywood movies, preferring a sanitized, prestige-picture gloss that keeps the audience at arm's length. By the time the credits finally drop over a reprise of that damn piano melody, you are just glad the jungle air conditioning has stopped blowing in your face.