I still have that weird little screeching sound stuck in my teeth from the menu screen of Smash Hitz - 2013, looping endlessly while I tried to find the remote under a couch cushion that hasn't seen a vacuum since the Obama administration. It’s a disc I bought at a petrol station in Leicester because I had four hours to kill and zero faith in my phone battery, which honestly feels like the exact right pedigree for a feature-length compilation of cinematic tie-in tracks from twelve years ago. If I'm honest, nobody outside of a late-night music channel programming block or an extremely bored video editor should probably be engaging with this material on a Sunday afternoon, yet here we are knee-deep in a forty-track barrage of compressed audio and anamorphic aspect ratios that refuse to match up. Hindi cinema has always had a complicated, slightly messy relationship with how it markets its own songs before the actual reels hit the cinemas, treating the music video as a bizarrely high-budget commercial that sometimes eclipses the movie it's selling. Smash Hitz - 2013 doesn't try to hide this commercial DNA, instead leaning so hard into the promotional hustle that it almost circles back around to being an avant-garde video art piece about late-stage capitalism and star-fudged vanity. You get the sense that the people cutting this together weren't thinking about cinematic legacy or auteur theory when they dragged these files into Premiere, they just needed to fill eighty minutes before the master tape had to be shipped back to Mumbai.

There's no credited director on the sleeve, obviously, which means we are dealing with the collective, faceless output of some studio post-production bullpen where three guys named Amit share an espresso machine and a stack of unauthorized hard drives. They handle the transitions between tracks with the desperate energy of a wedding DJ trying to bridge a heavy folk number into Pitbull without clearing the dance floor, slamming hard cuts against cross-dissolves that linger five frames too long. You watch a gritty action sequence featuring a brooding lead covered in grease and stage blood, and before the bass drop can fully resolve, you're suddenly staring at pastel-colored chiffon fluttering in a Swiss meadow while two different actors pretend to love each other under the watchful eye of a crane operator who probably wanted to go home to his kids. The screenplay, if you can call a tracklist assembled by an exhausted product manager a screenplay, has a three-act structure that consists entirely of getting louder, getting shinier, and then occasionally dropping into a mid-tempo romantic ballad that ruins whatever minor momentum the compilation managed to scrape together. It's a structure built on pure sensory exhaustion, hammering the viewer with high-contrast grading until every frame looks like it was dipped in melted Skittles and left to dry in a damp basement. You start to notice patterns in the coverage, like how every single chase sequence relies on the exact same two angles of a car spinning out on a dusty backlot, which makes you wonder if they rented the vehicle for only four hours and had to shoot the entire album's worth of driving footage during a single lunch break.

Performance-wise, we are looking at a gallery of the untouchable elite of commercial Indian cinema caught in their absolute prime, sweating under studio lights while pretending to lip-sync for their lives. Shah Rukh Khan does that thing with his eyebrows where he looks like he's about to cry or solve a Rubik's Cube, sometimes both in the same twelve-bar bridge, while the camera circles him so fast you half-expect him to get dizzy and stumble into the craft services table. Deepika Padukone shows up in about half of these clips, looking so impossibly composed that she makes the actual CGI explosions behind her look like cheap cardboard cutouts brought in by the work experience kid. It's funny watching how hard these stars work to sell a hook that was probably recorded on a laptop in Bandra by a session singer who never got proper credit on the sleeve notes. When you compare it to the gritty, lived-in fatigue of a performance like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, this stuff feels like watching mannequins trying to run a marathon during an earthquake, all high-gloss sheen and zero internal organ function. There is an entire sub-genre of acting happening here that exists solely from the neck up, because everything below the waist is just choreography designed to hit a specific mark before the beat changes and the director yells at everyone to reset.

The cinematography changes personality every four minutes depending on which budget tier the original feature film was working with, bouncing from desaturated digital gritty-realism to the kind of blinding, sun-drenched lens flare that used to give projectionists migraines. One minute you're looking at a moody, rain-slicked alleyway where the key light is bouncing off a puddle of suspiciously purple motor oil, and the next you're blinded by a helicopter shot of a desert salt flat that has been digitally boosted until the white salt hurts your actual retinas. The soundtrack is, of course, the whole point of this entire enterprise, compressed down to a uniform level of loudness that flattens every dynamic peak until the quiet emotional moments hit your ears with the same sonic force as a mortar shell. It’s a fascinating time capsule of a specific era in Hindi movies when producers realized they could just buy a club hit and paste it over a five-minute montage of their lead actor walking slowly toward the camera in slow motion. That particular aesthetic defined an entire decade of multiplex culture, trading narrative coherence for a series of high-impact moments that could be chopped up into fifteen-second clips for mobile phones before anyone had even figured out what TikTok was going to do to human attention spans. I kept getting distracted by a recurring continuity error in the background of three separate dance numbers where the same guy in a red hoodie can be seen eating a bag of chips while pretending to be a background dancer, and honestly, he's the most believable part of the whole production.

Themes are thin on the ground when you're jumping from a mafia revenge fantasy to a bouncy wedding-party anthem about how much fun everyone is having despite the looming threat of arranged marriage plot complications. Yet a weird kind of accidental portrait emerges from the wreckage, showing an industry utterly obsessed with luxury consumption and hyper-stylized Western validation while simultaneously clinging to traditional family melodramas with the grip of a drowning sailor. These tracks function as secular hymns to the idea of upward mobility, where every character lives in a penthouse that costs more than a small municipal airport and drives a sports car through crowded Mumbai streets without ever hitting a single goat or delivery scooter. It’s a fantasy version of urban life that makes New York in Sex and the City look like a documentary about inner-city blight, designed to appeal to diaspora audiences who wanted their homeland to look like a music video directed by someone who only understands human emotion through the medium of high-fashion lookbooks. You can feel the anxiety leaking through the seams of every glitter-soaked frame, the desperate need to prove that domestic productions could match the gloss of Hollywood blockbusters even if they had to squeeze forty distinct narrative arcs into three minutes of synth-heavy hooks. By the time the final stretch hits, the sheer volume of synchronized hip-thrusts starts to feel less like entertainment and more like an endurance test devised by people who hate you personally.

If you put Smash Hitz - 2013 on at a party, half the room will stare at it with glazed, nostalgic affection while the other half slowly backs toward the front door wondering why you brought such chaotic energy into their quiet Saturday night. It isn't good cinema, obviously, but it isn't quite trash either, sitting instead in that weird liminal space where commercial product transcends its own garbage factory origins to become something hypnotically hollow. I'll probably never watch the whole thing again because my retinas still hurt from that twenty-second stretch where three different pop tracks were mashed together using a visual filter that made everyone look like they had jaundice, but I'm sort of glad it exists on that shelf. It captures a moment right before streaming blew everything up and turned our viewing habits into an algorithmic soup, back when physical media compilations were still being churned out by people who clearly didn't care anymore. Sometimes you just need to sit back and let forty songs you've never heard wash over your brain while the actors scream silently behind a wall of visual effects, and for all its faults, this disc delivers that specific brand of numbness with impressive efficiency.