The sound design on that initial motorcycle engine turnover in the first act is mixed just a fraction too loud, clipping the high end of the theater speakers in a way that had me wincing into my popcorn. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because you spend the next two and a half hours listening to similar small sonic choices that flatten out the tension whenever the plot tries to get genuinely greasy. Rahul Dholakia directs with a kind of breathless haste, shooting Gujarat like a dusty sun-bleached labyrinth where every alleyway looks like it was constructed out of old cardboard boxes and high hopes. The screenplay feels stitched together from six different crime dramas that were left out in the rain, pulling disparate narrative threads through a swamp of melodramatic tropes without ever finding a steady rhythm. Scenes of quiet intimidation bleed abruptly into operatic confrontations that belong in a completely different movie, leaving the cast stranded between naturalistic gangster posturing and the kind of grandstanding dialogue that requires actors to shout over an escalating tabla beat. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise often feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a collection of expensive music videos awkwardly glued to a Wikipedia article about prohibition politics.

Shah Rukh Khan plays the bootlegger with his spectacles perpetually sliding down the bridge of his nose, leaning hard into the kohl-rimmed stare that worked so well for him back in Don, though here it feels like he is trying to remember how to be dangerous while keeping one eye on the overseas collections. He has this tic where he taps his fingers against his thigh right before delivering a threat, a nice little physical detail that grounds the character until the script forces him to launch into a ten-minute monologue about enterprise and community welfare. He shares screen space with Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the ascetic, dry-witted police officer dispatched to bring him down with the kind of casual menace that makes you wonder why anybody bothers casting standard heavies anymore. Siddiqui doesn't run so much as he scuttles through scenes, drinking endless cups of roadside chai and speaking in a low, flat monotone that drains the air right out of the room. Their cat-and-mouse dynamic carries the entire sagging midsection of the film, even when the director insists on cutting away to unnecessary flashbacks that explain motivations we already figured out thirty minutes prior.

And then there is Sunny Leone showing up in the middle of a crowded, sweat-soaked dance number that stops the narrative dead in its tracks just when it was starting to pick up some momentum. It’s a standard item song inserted squarely into the middle of the second hour, serving as a jarring reminder of how calculated these Hindi movies can be when the producers get nervous about pacing. The choreography is aggressively kinetic, relying on tight close-ups of spinning limbs and flashing lights that obscure the geography of the set entirely, making it feel less like a performance within a world and more like a commercial break for an energy drink. The supporting players drift in and out of the frame with varying degrees of conviction, and I swear the local politician who keeps popping up in the background of the warehouse scenes was dubbed by someone standing three feet away from a cheap plastic microphone in a basement studio.

Cinematographer Mohana Krishnan drenches everything in sickly amber tones during the day and neon blues at night, a visual palette that tries so hard to evoke a gritty retro aesthetic that it ends up looking like an Instagram filter left on maximum setting. The soundtrack refuses to let a single emotion breathe without an orchestral swell telling the audience exactly how to feel about a close-up of a broken liquor bottle. Ram Sampath’s background score thumps away relentlessly, borrowing heavily from the spaghetti western playbook while forgetting to leave any breathing room for the actors to register shock or betrayal without a brass section shouting over them. It’s an exhausting acoustic environment that makes you grateful for the rare scenes where the dialogue is delivered in absolute silence against the hum of a ceiling fan.

Underneath the gunfire and the moral posturing about the ethics of selling hooch in a dry state, the movie wants to be an epic about the cost of ambition and the inevitability of the state crushing the individual entrepreneur. It keeps gesturing toward the social strata that built the empire, showing how bootlegging funds schools and clinics for the destitute, but it never has the stomach to really interrogate those grey areas. Instead, it retreats comfortably into the arms of standard good-versus-evil moralizing where the tragic hero must ultimately pay for his sins through a hail of slow-motion bullets. We have seen this exact arc play out in countless other crime sagas, from Satya onward, and Raees doesn't bring anything new to the template except for a slightly better wardrobe and a more famous lead actor.

The editing room must have been a battlefield, given how frequently scenes dissolve into one another with jarring mismatch cuts that leave actors looking this way in one frame and facing completely opposite directions in the next. It’s a messy piece of commercial filmmaking that somehow stays afloat purely on the star wattage of its two leads and their palpable onscreen friction. When Khan and Siddiqui finally share a scene across a wooden desk in a desolate police station, the rest of the noise falls away and you realize what the film could have been if it had trusted its own restraint. That focus evaporates the moment they step back outside into another contrived action sequence involving a fleet of rusted trucks and exploding drums of ethanol, leaving you to watch the spectacle settle into the dust.