The sound design during the third act fistfights in Commando 3 has this weird wet thud that sounds less like human bone hitting flesh and more like a frozen turkey being dropped onto linoleum, which is maybe an honest mistake in the foley room, or maybe a budget thing, but either way it takes you right out of the room. It’s hard to stay fully dialed into a grand geopolitical thriller about religious harmony when the audio mixing makes every roundhouse kick sound like someone tenderizing skirt steak in the kitchen next door. Not great, not bad, just there. Vidyut Jammwal returns for the third iteration of this peculiar action franchise, playing Karan Singh Dogra with the exact same expressionless stoicism he brought to the first film and to Commando 2, a man who communicates almost exclusively through clenched jaw muscles and sudden bursts of extreme violence against men wearing tactical vests in abandoned warehouses. If you expected him to discover a broader emotional palette after spending several years punching bad guys across multiple sequels, you haven't been paying attention to how action stars operate in the modern ecosystem of Hindi movies, where versatility is mostly rated by how fast you can jump over a barbed wire fence while firing a submachine gun. He does his own stunts, which is genuinely impressive and makes most Hollywood green-screen work look like a middle school puppet show, but watching him act opposite a dramatic scene is like watching a very muscular lamppost trying to express complex grief.

Adah Sharma is back as Bhavna Reddy, though the script by Junaid Wasi reduces her from the chaotic energy she brought to the second film into a sort of exasperated sidekick who mostly stands around waiting for Karan to finish bending some poor henchman's arm backward until it snaps. There is a distinct lack of rhythm in the way Aditya Datt directs these transitional scenes, pushing the camera into aggressive Dutch angles whenever two characters are just talking about airplane tickets or passport photocopies, as if every conversation about logistics needs to look like a music video for an energy drink. Gulshan Devaiah plays the villain, a radicalized mastermind operating out of London who wants to divide India along sectarian lines through coordinated bombings, and he brings a theatrical, almost campy menace to the role that feels entirely disconnected from the cardboard seriousness of Jammwal's performance. Devaiah chews through his monologues with an oily charm that makes you wish he was in a better picture, maybe something closer to Shaitan where his twitchy energy actually had somewhere specific to go. Instead, he spends most of his screen time pacing around a gothic mansion in London wearing silk robes and delivering speeches about brotherhood that sound like they were pulled directly from an editorial in a second-rate newspaper. The dialogue keeps hammering home its message about national unity with the subtlety of a falling grand piano, lecturing the audience on how diversity is our greatest strength while the main character prepares to snap a terrorist's neck with his bare thighs.

The plot itself is essentially a cross-continental scavenger hunt where Karan and Bhavna team up with British intelligence agents played by Angira Dhar and Harris Rashid, moving from one brightly lit European street to another without ever feeling like they are actually inhabiting a real city. The cinematography by Mark Hamilton relies heavily on desaturated blues and grays that make every location look like it was color-graded inside a walk-in freezer, draining the warmth out of both the Indian sequences and the London back alleys. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how every time they enter a new country, the film inserts a sweeping drone shot of a recognizable landmark, as if the audience needs constant geographic reminders that yes, we are in London now, or yes, we are looking at a bridge. The editing cuts away from the impact of the hits just slightly too often, robbing the choreography of its raw power and forcing you to rely on that aforementioned frozen-turkey sound design to figure out if someone just got kicked in the jaw or the chest. Action choreography in bollywood movies has reached a point of high technical polish where everyone moves with the precision of dancers, but Datt relies on so many fast pans and blurry whip-cuts that you lose track of who is punching whom during the mid-sized skirmishes in narrow corridors. The soundtrack by Mannan Shaah and Vikram Montrose tries desperately to manufacture suspense with heavy synth basslines that pulse under every scene where characters look at computer screens, but the tracks are so generic they blend into the background noise of the theater cooling system.

What makes the movie interesting, in a purely sociological sense, is how clumsily it tries to graft a progressive message about secularism onto a standard-issue nationalist revenge fantasy. Karan spends a lot of time telling people that true faith is about love and not division, usually right before he kicks three guys into a plate glass window or throws a knife into someone's shoulder. It creates this jarring tonal whiplash where the film wants to be a modern lecture on communal harmony while simultaneously operating on the most primitive vigilante logic imaginable. The supporting characters exist merely to validate Karan's moral superiority, nodding solemnly whenever he delivers a platitude about how criminals have no religion, which feels a bit rich coming from a guy whose entire job description is extrajudicial execution without trial. There is a strange disconnect in contemporary hindi films where the heroes are expected to be both pious guardians of the constitution and remorseless killing machines who bypass the judicial system entirely because it gets in the way of a forty-minute runtime limit. The direction treats the villains with a weird kind of cinematic fascination, giving them elaborate hideouts and philosophical motivations that are far more interesting than the flat, unyielding goodness of the hero, who never once questions his own methods or suffers a moment of doubt. When you compare this to a tighter, meaner thriller like Badlapur, where violence actually leaves psychological scars on the people participating in it, Commando 3 feels like a cartoon drawn with permanent markers on poster board.

The supporting cast does what they can with material that treats them mostly as exposition delivery systems, though Angira Dhar gets saddled with some of the stiffest line readings of the year, sounding like she is reading every syllable off a teleprompter hung just behind the camera lens. The scenes involving British police bureaucracy are particularly painful, featuring extras who look like they were pulled off the street outside the studio twenty minutes before cameras rolled and told to look stern near a filing cabinet. It’s the kind of lazy international casting that has plagued action cinema for decades, where anyone with a British accent can be plugged into a security consultant role regardless of whether they can actually act under pressure. The pacing in the second hour drags considerably as the characters bounce between safe houses, engaging in lengthy tactical discussions that amount to little more than waiting for the next location where Jammwal can take his shirt off and fight ten guys at once. That shirtless fight, arriving dutifully in the final twenty minutes, is the main event everyone bought a ticket for, and to his credit, Jammwal delivers a genuinely brutal exhibition of martial arts technique that transcends the muddy editing surrounding it. He spins, flips, and strikes with a clean, devastating efficiency that makes you wish the director had just set up a static wide shot and let the man work without all the digital trickery and frantic camera movement. You leave the theater not with a sense of lingering dread or political enlightenment, but with the distinct impression that you've just watched an extended demo reel for a very expensive personal trainer who happens to know how to handle a prop knife.