Amit Sadh takes three steps toward the camera, mutters something about trust, and then the frame cuts to a close-up of a prison lock that looks distinctly like painted plastic. It is a small thing, but it bugged me from the very first reel of Operation Parindey, hanging there like an untrimmed thread on a cheap jacket. Hindi films have this habit of spending money on the drone shots while skimping on the texture of the props, as if a sufficiently high resolution can somehow convince us that a prop master picked up the first thing lying around the prop truck. Sanjay Gadhvi directs this thing with the frantic energy of a man who just discovered fast cuts, which means we spend a lot of time watching doors slam and feet hit linoleum without ever getting a sense of where anyone actually is in the room. You start wishing the camera would just hold still for more than three seconds so you could figure out the geography of the jail yard, but the editing room was clearly handed a pair of hedge clippers and told to go to town. The screenplay, credited to a committee of thriller mechanics, treats geography like a suggestion rather than a physical constraint, teleporting guards and prisoners across corridors that clearly don't connect to one another in any building on earth. Not great, not bad, just there, sliding by on the streaming queue while you fold laundry or scroll through your phone trying to remember why you clicked play in the first place.

Amit Sadh plays CP, a cop whose entire personality consists of staring intensely into the middle distance and wearing jackets that cost more than my first car. He has this one gesture where he pinches the bridge of his nose every time a subordinate speaks, which I suppose is meant to convey the crushing weight of administrative incompetence, but mostly just looks like he forgot to put in his contact lenses. It is a performance built out of leftover parts from his work in Kai Po Che, stripped of the messy vulnerability that made that earlier role stick in your ribs, leaving behind only the silhouette of a brooding authority figure. Rahul Dev, on the other hand, wanders in as the criminal mastermind with a graying beard and a tired smile that suggests he read the script in the vanity van and realized he was just there to cash a check and hit his marks before tea time. He doesn't chew the scenery so much as nibble at the edges of it, polite and slightly bored, giving us a mastermind who seems less like a dangerous fugitive and more like a retired geography teacher who missed his bus home. Rucha Inamdar shows up in a few scenes to look concerned over a desk, holding a file that is almost certainly empty, lending a brief flash of credibility to dialogue that sounds like it was translated from an instruction manual for a lawnmower.

The cinematography relies heavily on a blue-tinted filter that makes every single indoor scene look like it was shot inside a functioning refrigerator at three in the morning. When the sun does come out, it is aggressively overexposed, burning out the highlights on the actors' foreheads until they look like they've been dipped in canola oil before stepping onto the set. There is a motorcycle chase in the middle stretch that goes on for an eternity, featuring the exact same three-second loop of a stunt double leaning into a turn, recycled four times across two different locations that are supposed to be thirty miles apart. The background score is composed primarily of synthesized drum hits that drop whenever someone opens a door or looks at a computer screen, a heavy-handed cueing system that tells you how to feel about a man walking down a hallway. Bollywood movies have been leaning on this particular brand of sonic wallpaper for years now, replacing actual tension with the steady, thumping heartbeat of a cheap MIDI keyboard that refuses to turn off until the fade to black.

Underneath the generic cat-and-mouse plotting, the film wants to be a meditation on institutional rot and the fragile nature of state authority, but it has all the political insight of a Sunday supplement editorial written by an intern. We get endless scenes of men in uniform shouting at each other across shiny wooden tables, arguing about jurisdiction and protocol as if paperwork were the true antagonist of the piece. This is standard operating procedure for the modern digital thriller, where the real enemy is never the man with the gun, but the budget committee that forgot to approve the requisition form for better CCTV cameras. It all feels terribly safe, sanded down at the corners so it won't offend the algorithm or challenge anyone watching while half-asleep on a Tuesday night. When the prisoners finally make their escape, it lacks any sense of real danger, feeling more like a school play where everyone knows the lines and just wants to get to the cast party.

By the time the credits begin to crawl, the film has long since exhausted whatever minor goodwill it managed to scrape together in the opening minutes with that plastic padlock. There is an epilogue involving a helicopter that was clearly filmed on a different day with a completely different camera package, mismatched color grading and all, sitting there at the end like a dropped stitch on a cheap sweater. You walk away wondering who this was actually made for, this assembly-line machine of middle-brow suspense that doesn't even have the decency to be properly bad enough to talk about over drinks. It is just another piece of digital content filling up space on a hard drive, waiting for the next recommendation engine to sweep it under the virtual rug.