There is a specific sound a silencer makes in Sriram Raghavan movies that has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with wanting you to feel the finality of a choice made in a drab corridor. Agent Vinod makes that sound a lot, usually right after Saif Ali Khan looks slightly inconvenienced by a man falling into a filing cabinet. Hindi films generally treat espionage like a magic show where the doves are replaced by charter planes and explosions that cost more than a housing estate, but this thing wanted to be dirty. It wanted to smell like stale tobacco in a Marrakech airport hotel room and cheap gin. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise wobbles constantly between being an icy genre exercise and a bloated star vehicle that forgot to trim forty minutes of plot involving stolen nuclear material that nobody can quite remember the name of once the credits hit. But that specific sound kept me watching when the editing started to fray at the edges.

Raghavan directs with his teeth gritted. He doesn't care if you missed the connection between the guy in Tangier and the woman in Riga because the camera is too busy tracking a shattered glass of water across a parquet floor during a firefight that refuses to look choreographed. The screenplay is a mess of MacGuffins and double-crosses that would make John le Carré throw his typewriter into a canal, yet it moves with such unhinged velocity that you forgive the narrative plumbing falling apart in every third scene. You get sequences in Russian underground stations and St. Petersburg hotel rooms that feel genuinely lived-in rather than generated by a location scout with a glossy portfolio. The violence isn't clean. People die with wet, heavy thuds, and the movie has this nasty habit of lingering on a corpse just long enough for you to remember that nobody in this universe is getting a medal or a parade at the end of the day. It’s an exhausting way to watch a Friday night thriller, which is probably why audiences didn't quite know what to do with it when it hit theaters a decade ago.

Saif Ali Khan plays the title role like a man who has been awake for thirty-six hours and desperately needs a sandwich. He doesn't smile much, and when he does, it looks like he’s calculating the recoil of a Browning 9mm against his collarbone. He lacks the theatrical swagger that Shah Rukh Khan brought to Don, but that absence of charm is precisely what makes him work as an operative who has survived by being entirely forgettable until the moment he isn't. He moves through chaotic crowd scenes in Eastern Europe with a kind of blank fatigue that feels earned. Kareena Kapoor, on the other hand, is saddled with a character arc that requires her to look devastating in a succession of cocktail dresses while mourning a fiancé whose name changes every fifteen minutes. She tries to inject some actual grief into scenes where she is literally running across rooftops in heels, and though it doesn't always land, her exhaustion matches his. They share an onscreen chemistry that is less romantic than it is purely transactional, two professionals waiting for the extraction helicopter that might not show up.

The supporting cast features enough veteran faces to stock an entire festival of forgotten nineties thrillers. Prem Chopra shows up for a stretch that feels like a contractual obligation fulfilled with a weary sigh. Gulshan Grover plays a villain with an accent that travels across three continents without settling on a zip code, and Ram Kapoor chews the Moroccan scenery with an enthusiasm that borders on alarming. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how obviously dubbed some of the European bit players are; you can hear the studio acoustics in a scene set inside a cavernous Latvian warehouse, the dialogue floating an inch above the actors' teeth like an unedited podcast. Yet Pritam's score refuses to let you dwell on these technical lapses. It drives the action with a relentless, bass-heavy pulse that borrows liberally from seventies spy grooves without ever sounding like a straight cover version. The cinematography by C.K. Muraleedharan does something interesting with light, stripping the color out of international capitals until everywhere looks like a grey waiting room in a provincial hospital.

There is an underlying cynicism to how this movie views borders and allegiances that feels rare for mainstream Indian cinema, where patriotism is usually signaled by a soaring brass section and a flag waving in slow motion. Here, countries are just temporary holding pens where you get shot at by people who used to be on your payroll. Nobody believes in the cause because the cause was apparently outsourced to a private contractor three decades ago. Vinod doesn't save the world; he barely saves himself from a hotel room ambush involving an assassin with a garrote and a very bad haircut. It’s that smallness of scale within a massive canvas that saves the picture from becoming just another noisy franchise starter. When the narrative finally collapses under the weight of its own geography, the film doesn't try to save itself with a big speech about loyalty or the motherland. It just cuts to black while our hero walks down another anonymous street with his hands in his pockets, looking for a cab that won't stop for him.