There is a specific kind of background score in third-tier Hindi films that sounds like it was recorded on a Casio keyboard found in a damp garage, and Kissan uses it right from the opening title card to establish a mood of aggressive, unearned urgency. If I'm honest, the sound mixing alone is enough to give you a mild headache before the plot even decides to kick into gear. You sit there in the dark waiting for something to anchor onto, some visual cue that tells you whether you are watching a grand familial tragedy or a hastily thrown-together tax write-off from the late two-thousands. It never really decides, choosing instead to drift through a muddy middle ground where rural melodrama meets the kind of urban-inflected ego trip usually reserved for vanity projects that star real-life siblings playing on-screen siblings because nobody else would take the call. Sohail Khan and Arbaaz Khan share screen space here as brothers caught in the tractor-pull of paternal expectation, and their dynamic feels less like lived-in kinship and more like two guys who showed up to the same location van without checking the call sheet. It is a messy affair, full of sudden zooms, weeping mothers, and dialogues about ancestral soil that sound like they were translated from an old pamphlet by someone who had never actually seen a farm.

Director Puneet Sira tries very hard to graft the muscular, chest-thumping aesthetic of nineties actioners onto a contemporary agrarian crisis, which creates a tonal whiplash so severe you feel it in your teeth. One minute we are watching a sun-drenched pastoral landscape that looks suspiciously like a studio backlot with some fake hay tossed over the gravel, and the next we are trapped in a slow-motion confrontation scene where the bad guy wears sunglasses indoors and twirls a stubby revolver like he is auditioning for a local theater production of a spaghetti western. The screenplay relies on coincidence so brazen it almost crosses over into comedy, particularly during the second act when every single major character manages to show up at the exact same dusty intersection just in time to misunderstand a crucial conversation. There is a supporting actor playing a corrupt local official who is so clearly dubbed by three different voice artists that his mouth movements rarely match any recognizable language, let alone Hindi. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he appeared on screen because the sound design refused to match his jawline.

Jackie Shroff anchors the whole chaotic enterprise as the patriarch, and he brings that familiar, gravelly exhaustion he has been deploying with varying degrees of success ever since *Gupt*. He wears a checked shirt, scowls at the horizon, and delivers lines about hard work with the heavy-lidded detachment of a man who signed the contract during a long lunch and is now just trying to collect his check before sunset. When he is angry, he drops his voice into a register that vibrates the microphone, and when he is sad, he simply stares out a window while the previously mentioned Casio keyboard noodles away in the minor key. It is not a subtle performance, but subtlety was banned from the set on day one. Sohail Khan plays the rebellious younger brother with a permanent smirk that suggests he knows something we don't, which is distracting when the scene calls for genuine grief over a ruined harvest. Arbaaz plays the steady, long-suffering older sibling who takes the brunt of the abuse from the moneylenders, and he does this by standing very still with his arms folded across his chest until someone yells cut. The women, Dia Mirza and Nauheed Cyrusi, are mostly shoved into the corners of the frame to look concerned while the men yell about land titles, functioning as human props in a narrative that treats female agency as an administrative inconvenience.

The cinematography relies almost exclusively on golden-hour filters and dramatic close-ups of cracked earth, as if reminding us that we are watching a movie about farmers because the dialogue isn't doing the job. Every time a character contemplates their financial ruin, the camera swoops in from a low angle to make them look like tragic heroes on a postage stamp, completely undermining the gritty realism the script occasionally pretends to care about. Bollywood movies have a long, storied history of using the village as a moral compass against the corruption of the city, but Kissan handles this dynamic with the grace of a sledgehammer hitting a piñata. The soundtrack features songs that interrupt the narrative rhythm with the enthusiasm of an uninvited uncle crashing a family dinner, pulling us out of whatever meager tension the plot has managed to accumulate. You find yourself watching the background extras to pass the time, noticing the guy in the blue kurta who forgets to pretend to work whenever the camera pans past him.

These thematic concerns about debt, generational duty, and the loss of traditional livelihoods are important ones, but they are handled with such broad, blunt strokes that any real emotional resonance gets flattened into a generic pamphlet about rural struggles. When a film tries to speak for the working man using dialogue that sounds like it was cribbed from an editorial page, it stops being a story and starts being a lecture delivered by someone who is checking their watch. The pacing collapses entirely in the third act, dragging through a series of predictable confrontations that resolve themselves through sudden, unearned epiphanies rather than logical character growth. You walk away remembering individual moments of strange, low-budget charm rather than the grand moral message about the sanctity of the earth. It occupies that strange cinematic space where sincerity and incompetence are welded so tightly together that you can no longer tell where the bad filmmaking ends and the earnest ambition begins, leaving you to stare blankly at the screen as the credits finally crawl past against a backdrop of recycled stock footage.