The background score in the second half of Selfiee hits a brassy, overdriven stinger every single time Emraan Hashmi looks sternly into a rearview mirror, which happens enough times in the first twenty minutes to make you wonder if the sound mixer had a seizure on the mixing board and nobody bothered to call a retake. It is a small thing, sure, but it gets under your skin because the movie keeps leaning on that one sonic cue like a crutch when the dramatic tension is already sagging under the weight of its own premise. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise feels rushed through the edit bay with a blunt instrument, leaving rough edges on dialogue scenes that should have breathed a little more before cutting away to wide shots of dusty municipal lots.

Raj Mehta directs with the frantic, scattershot energy of a man trying to catch three loose chickens in a phone booth, jumping between angles without ever establishing spatial geography so you constantly lose track of who is standing next to whom in these supposedly high-octane confrontations. The script, adapted from the Malayalam hit Driving Licence, tries to map the bitter feud between an insecure movie star and an enraged RTO inspector onto the vast, chaotic canvas of modern commercial Hindi films, but it loses the intimate, character-driven friction that made the original work so effectively petty. Akshay Kumar plays Vijay Kumar, a fading superstar desperately needing a new driver's license to save a crumbling career trajectory, while Hashmi plays Om Prakash Agarwal, a local traffic cop and die-hard fan whose devotion curdles into violent humiliation when a simple bureaucratic handshake goes sideways in front of a horde of camera phones.

Kumar wears the exhausted, dead-eyed expression of an actor who has spent the last decade reading cue cards off shiny reflectors, bringing very little actual menace or charm to a role that demands a delicate balance of vanity and pathetic self-awareness. He doesn't look like a matinee idol so much as a man who wandered onto a studio backlot by mistake and decided to collect a paycheck anyway, though he does manage one genuinely funny deadpan reaction when a producer suggests replacing him with a younger internet personality who has abs made of plastic and three million followers. Hashmi fares better simply because his character has a pulse, playing the wounded bureaucrat with a twitchy, aggrieved intensity that feels rooted in actual human spite rather than script-mandated plot points, even if he is occasionally let down by dialogue that spells out his emotional arc in neon letters three feet high.

The cinematography by Rajeev Ravi, or someone trying very hard to imitate his gritty, handheld aesthetic during the outdoor sequences, lurches drunkenly through traffic jams and dingy government offices with a grayish digital sheen that drains all the color out of Bhopal, making everything look like it was shot through a dirty windshield on an overcast Tuesday. Nushrratt Bharuccha and Diana Penty show up in underwritten supporting turns as the respective wives, tasked mostly with standing in kitchens or hotel suites looking concerned while their husbands scream at television screens or throw punches in municipal parking lots, though Bharuccha has one nice moment where she rolls her eyes at her husband's sudden obsession with internet clout.

Bollywood movies have long loved the meta-narrative of the suffering celebrity, dating back through Fan and even older melodramas about the cost of fame, but Selfiee treats its central meta-joke with surprising clumsiness, treating the media circus as an abstract nuisance rather than an active participant in the destruction of these men's lives. The screenplay treats its audience with zero patience, rushing from one shouting match to the next without allowing the central conflict—a simple missing piece of plastic with a photograph on it—to gather any real satirical momentum, preferring instead to load up the soundtrack with remixes of older chartbusters that arrive with all the subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window.

There is an interesting conversation to be had about the weaponization of fandom in the age of smartphone cameras, but this movie would rather stage an elaborate, CGI-heavy action sequence where Akshay Kumar jumps off a burning shipping container than sit down and examine why two grown men are willing to ruin their families over a bureaucratic slight. It lands in that awkward middle tier of contemporary Hindi cinema where the stakes are supposed to feel massive because the background score is blaring at full blast, but you walk out of the theater remembering only the specific irritation of that one brassy stinger playing every time a character checks their phone notifications.