There is a specific kind of digital glare in modern Hindi films that makes every patch of desert look like it was rendered by an intern who just discovered the color orange on a Friday afternoon. Tejas starts right there, throwing ambient sand into the lens with such aggressive indifference that you immediately check your watch to see if you can make the early train. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels less like a motion picture released in theaters and more like an extended recruitment commercial that somehow lost its funding halfway through the third reel and had to rely heavily on stock footage of clouds. Kangana Ranaut plays an Air Force pilot named Tejas Gill, a character who apparently communicates primarily through tight-lipped stares into the middle distance and dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a motivational poster hanging in a dentist's waiting room. She wears the uniform with a stiff formality that keeps you at a distance, refusing to let any actual human messiness peek through the aviators or the stern chin. The script, written and directed by Sarvesh Mewara, treats narrative momentum like an optional subscription service that nobody bothered to renew for this billing cycle.

Let us talk about the villain because Bollywood movies have developed this bizarre habit of casting generic foreign actors who look like they wandered off the set of a straight-to-video action flick from the late nineties. The antagonists here are cartoonish terrorists with accents so muddy you need subtitles just to figure out which country they are supposedly invading or protecting. They bark orders in English while their subordinates nod solemnly in rooms that resemble abandoned warehouses rented by the hour in Greater Noida. The plotting lurches from one extraction mission to another without bothering to establish geography, scale, or basic tactical logic. Characters teleport across international borders simply because the editing suite decided it was time for another explosion. You get sequences where fighter jets engage in dogfights that resemble low-budget video game cutscenes from a decade ago, complete with physics that would make Isaac Newton weep openly into his porridge. It is loud, it is chaotic, and it lacks the rudimentary spatial awareness required to make an aerial combat scene even mildly legible to the naked eye.

Ranaut is an actor capable of ferocious, unhinged brilliance when given material that matches her intensity, but here she is stranded in a desert of platitudes. Think back to her work in Queen, where every awkward gesture and defensive hunch of the shoulders told a complete story about vulnerability and reinvention without requiring a single speech about national pride. In Tejas, every emotion is announced five minutes before it arrives on screen via a swelling orchestral cue that refuses to quit. She delivers lines about duty and sacrifice with the heavy-handed solemnity of a high school debater reading from a heavily revised card. There is an early scene in a mess hall where she has to chew out a subordinate for slacking off, and the sheer volume of her delivery flattens any potential nuance the interaction might have possessed. The supporting cast fares even worse, trapped in roles that exist solely to look terrified or to die heroically while saluting the camera. Varun Mitra shows up as a handler or a fellow officer, it honestly blurs together after a while, and he spends his entire screen time frowning at computer monitors like a man who just realized he left his oven on back home.

It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time it happened: the sound design relies on this exact same metallic ping whenever someone presses a button in the cockpit, and they use it about four hundred times. That repetition grates on the nerves long before the halfway mark, turning what should be atmospheric tension into a persistent acoustic annoyance. The cinematography by Hari K. Nair alternates between suffocating close-ups of Ranaut's eyebrows and wide drone shots of barren landscapes that have been graded until every shadow looks bruised. There is no rhythm to the cuts, no sense of building a proper sequence of events where cause leads naturally to effect. Instead, scenes just begin and end abruptly, dropping characters into new locations with zero preamble or transitional breathing room. You find yourself gazing at the texture of the cockpit walls just to pass the time during the endless exposition dumps delivered via crackling radio static.

Hindi cinema has a long and storied tradition of military drama, from genuinely stirring classics down to cynical flag-waving exercises that mistake volume for valor. Tejas firmly anchors itself in the latter camp, prioritizing loud slogans over earned emotional stakes or coherent storytelling. Whenever the film attempts to dig into the psychological weight carried by someone who kills for a living, it retreats immediately to a safe, sanitised flashback involving family honor and a dying mentor's final whispered advice. These tropes are so well-worn they have nearly dissolved into dust, yet the screenplay trots them out with all the enthusiasm of a freshman discovering poetry for the first time. The thematic ambitions are entirely skin-deep, offering up generalized notions of bravery that feel calculated to pass through the censorship board without raising a single official eyebrow rather than provoking any genuine thought from the audience sitting in the dark.

By the time the third act descends into a chaotic hostage rescue inside a sprawling desert fortress, you have stopped caring about the geopolitical stakes entirely. The action staging becomes so frantic that you can no longer tell who is shooting at whom, or why certain characters are suddenly running across open courtyards without any cover. Ranaut executes roundhouse kicks and fires assault rifles with grim determination, but the choreography lacks the kinetic clarity that made Uri so effective at pumping adrenaline through the room. Everything is obscured by lens flare and digital smoke until the screen resembles a muddy television set tuned to a dead channel during a thunderstorm. The closing moments try desperately to manufacture a tear-jerking emotional crescendo out of thin air, but the foundation was never poured to begin with. You simply sit there watching the credits roll over a patriotic anthem, wondering how a project featuring such immense institutional backing managed to feel so completely hollow and forgettable before the lights even came back up in the auditorium.