Sunil Shetty wears a leather jacket in this movie that looks like it cost thirty bucks at a roadside stall in Bandra and honestly, that's kind of all you need to know about the budget. Hindi films have a long and glorious history of putting aging action stars into outerwear that tries very hard to suggest international espionage while actually just trapping body heat in a humid Mumbai studio. He plays a CBI officer or something equally vague with a badge that he flashes at people while looking moderately constipated. If I'm honest, the plot arrives about twenty minutes late and stays through the credits without ever wiping its feet.

Ashu Trikha directs with the sort of frantic enthusiasm you usually see from a substitute teacher trying to control a room of sugar-fuelled twelve-year-olds after lunch. The camera moves constantly, swooping down hallways and circling actors during conversations about forensic reports as if any second now someone is going to pull out a chainsaw, though usually it is just Mithun Chakraborty sitting behind a very large mahogany desk delivering exposition with the weary charisma of a man who has signed sixty movie contracts this month and regrets fifty-eight of them. The screenplay relies heavily on people walking into rooms and shouting names while dramatic bass drops rattle the cinema subwoofers. It has that mid-tier nineties hangover where the editing bay discovered the dissolve effect and refused to let go, smearing transitions across scenes like bad makeup.

Mithun's presence is gravitational, pulling the surrounding chaos into something resembling watchfulness even when his son, Mahakshay Chakraborty, is on screen doing aggressive things with his jawline. Mahakshay plays the younger cop, the loose cannon who disobeys direct orders because his heart is too big for the bureaucratic rulebook, which is a character arc borrowed wholesale from every bad VHS copy of a Hollywood action thriller rotting in a rental shop basement since nineteen-eighty-eight. He tries very hard, God bless him, throwing himself into fistfights in rain-slicked alleyways that smell of damp cardboard and cheap pyrotechnics. Kay Kay Menon shows up later to play the villain with the exact brand of icy detachment he brought to Corporate, though here he is given lines like "you cannot cage a wild animal in a zoo of laws" and has to say them with a straight face while standing in front of a green-screened skyline of Mumbai that looks like a screensaver from Windows XP.

There is a recurring sound cue every time a pistol is drawn that sounds less like a gun and more like a heavy filing cabinet drawer being slammed shut by an angry accountant, and after the fourth time it happens in the same interrogation scene, it starts to feel like a personal insult from the sound designer. Johnny Lever appears for approximately four minutes of comic relief that involves mistaken identity and a very loud shirt, a tradition in Hindi movies that feels increasingly like a mandatory tax paid by the narrative just to keep the ushers awake in the balcony. The cinematography swaps between overexposed daylight shots that bleach out every actor's forehead and murky night scenes where half the frame is just shadow and grit, capturing the distinct aesthetic of direct-to-video actioners that played on local cable networks at two in the morning.

Beneath the bluster about rogue elements and internal corruption, the movie is really just about men standing in slightly different rooms shouting at other men about jurisdiction. Nobody ever sits down normally; they always perch on the edge of desks or lean against doorframes with folded arms as if resting their backs would break the dramatic tension of the scene. The villains operate out of industrial warehouses that always seem to have twenty-five completely useless oil drums sitting around just waiting for someone to shoot them so they can explode in a fireball of orange kerosene. It is a world where police stations consist of one large desk, a vintage telephone, and three extras in khaki uniforms who never blink, inhabiting a cinematic ecosystem that stopped evolving sometime around the release of Ghatak.

The supporting players mumble their lines into wireless microphones hidden under synthetic shirts, creating an auditory disconnect where the dialogue sounds like it was recorded inside a walk-in freezer three weeks after principal photography wrapped. Sunil Shetty keeps his sunglasses on indoors for entire narrative stretches, communicating a profound indifference to the lighting conditions of government offices and abandoned shipyards alike. You can practically see the crew members reflected in the lenses if you sit three rows from the front and squint past the projection flicker. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he turned his head toward a window that had no glass in it.

Action directors still cling to the belief that if you speed up the footage by five percent during a roundhouse kick, the audience will somehow mistake it for actual kinetic energy, forgetting that our eyes stopped falling for that trick around the time digital cameras became standard issue. The fights feature that hollow thud sound effect that reminds you of someone hitting a sack of turnips with a cricket bat in an empty garage. No one throws a punch without telegraphing it three business days in advance, giving the recipient ample time to adjust their posture and brace for the impact while staring blankly into the middle distance.

By the time the final confrontation rolls around in a disused cement factory with zero health and safety compliance, the narrative has accumulated so many loose threads that it simply drops them off the edge of the screen and hopes you won't ask questions during the drive home. You get the distinct impression that half the subplot involving international diamond smuggling was edited out by someone who realized the runtime was pushing two hours and panicked, leaving gaping logic holes that you could happily drive a water tanker through. It lacks the polish of a prestige thriller and the gleeful abandon of a proper masala caper, sitting awkwardly in that dusty middle tier of commercial cinema where projects go to die quietly on Friday afternoons.

There is a stubborn, blue-collar honesty to the whole enterprise that prevents it from becoming entirely insufferable, even when the script descends into absolute gibberish about national security and double agents with personal grudges. Shetty and Mithun share about three scenes together where they look each other in the eye and pretend they are in a movie with twice the budget and half the ego, and those moments actually sort of work. The rest of it is just filler, noise, and expensive hair gel disappearing into the humid night air.