Rajkummar Rao has a very particular way of breathing through his teeth when he is trying to pretend he is fine, and it is the first thing you notice in HIT - The First Case because he spends almost the entire running time doing it while a soundtrack designed to rattle loose fillings tries to convince you you are watching a psychological thriller of consequence. If I'm honest, the whole thing feels a bit rushed in the middle, like someone realized they were twenty pages over schedule and just started cutting scenes with an axe rather than a scalpel. You get the sense that Dr. Sailesh Kolanu, remaking his own Telugu original, wanted to keep the forward momentum so fierce that nobody in the audience would have time to ask why a homicide investigator prone to debilitating panic attacks is allowed to keep driving around Jaipur with a loaded Glock and a blood-pressure monitor strapped to his wrist. Vikram is his name, an officer of the Homicide Intervention Team who refuses to take a leave of absence despite his superiors practically begging him to go sit in a dark room for a month, and Rao plays him with that familiar, slightly frantic intensity we have all seen since Trapped, though here the desperation feels occasionally manufactured to cover up the fact that the screenplay is running on fumes and old genre tropes. We are dropped into a world where every single woman who goes missing is either a student with a secret or a homemaker with a past, and the investigation proceeds not through methodical police work but through Vikram having sudden, violent flashbacks while staring aggressively at coffee cups and crime scene tape.

The direction tries very hard to maintain a tone of perpetual gloom, shooting the interiors in shades of slate grey and mustard yellow that make every police station look like it has been dipped in nicotine, but the geography of the film makes zero sense if you have ever spent five minutes looking at a map of Rajasthan. Shanu Kumar and Rohan Singh pop up in supporting roles that require them to look concerned while holding folders, though I swear one of them is clearly dubbed by a completely different actor whose voice doesn't match his jawline, a small mechanical annoyance that pulled me right out of the interrogation scenes every single time it happened. The screenplay relies heavily on the trope of the troubled cop who is better at his job than everyone else in the department combined, a conceit that wears thin about twenty minutes in when Vikram starts yelling at his boss for simply suggesting that a missing persons case might not be an international conspiracy. Sanya Malhotra is severely underutilized as Neha, playing the understanding girlfriend who also happens to work in the same high-pressure environment, which mostly translates to her standing in doorways telling Vikram to take his pills before walking out of the frame so he can stare blankly at the wall. The narrative structure is essentially a series of dead ends punctuated by loud noises, moving from one abduction to the next with the mechanical precision of a conveyor belt in a bad factory, and the Hindi movie machine has produced dozens of these efficiency-obsessed procedurals over the years without ever bothering to make the characters feel like actual human beings who eat lunch or talk about things other than the case.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in about halfway through modern Hindi films when the exposition starts arriving in huge, dumped-truck loads of dialogue rather than visual information, and HIT commits this sin with alarming regularity, explaining character motivations through long confessions in dimly lit parking lots. Rao does his best to anchor these moments with his physical commitment, leaning against pillars and clutching his ribs as if the weight of the investigation is literally crushing his internal organs, but the material simply does not support the heavy-lifting he is attempting. He was much better at playing the unraveling everyman in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, where his quietness felt earned instead of frantic, whereas here he is constantly pitching his voice to the back row even when he is having a quiet conversation in a hospital hallway. The supporting cast, which includes Dilip Tahhil looking distinguished and tired in the background of three separate scenes where people shout at each other, does not get enough to do to make the procedural elements hum with any real tension. Cinematographer Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran keeps the camera moving in long, gliding tracking shots that follow characters down sterile corridors, a visual tic that starts out feeling sleek and quickly devolves into motion sickness. The background score by John Stewart Eduri refuses to let a single scene breathe, swelling into aggressive synth-bass drops every time someone opens a car door or looks suspiciously at a janitor, which gets grating long before the intermission card finally drops.

By the time the third act rolls around and the true villain is revealed through a series of absurdly convenient coincidences that would make even a daytime soap opera writer blush, the film has completely abandoned any interest in psychological realism in favor of a fistfight in a muddy pit that looks like it was lit with a single flashlight. Bollywood movies have a long, tedious history of wrapping up complex investigations with a moralizing monologue about trauma and familial duty, and this one hits every single note of that wearying symphony without bringing a single fresh idea to the table. The thematic core of the film—that we are all running from our pasts until our pasts catch up with us in the form of a masked kidnapper—is handled with the subtlety of a falling safe, treating mental health issues as convenient plot devices that can be turned on and off depending on whether the scene requires a panic attack or a roundhouse kick. It is a shame, because the core idea of a specialized rapid-response unit for missing persons in urban centers has plenty of dramatic meat on its bones, but the execution is so relentlessly pedestrian that it reduces everything to a series of checkmarks on a producer's list of thriller requirements. The sound design is particularly guilty of this, recycling the exact same metallic screech every time Vikram experiences a trigger, and after the fourth or fifth time you hear it, you start wishing someone would just take the sound effects guy's keyboard away so the actors could finish a sentence without being interrupted by a sonic boom.

In the end, you are left sitting in the dark wondering why everyone on screen is sweating so much about a mystery that turns out to have the emotional complexity of a Saturday morning cartoon, and the closing credits roll without giving you a single memorable image to take home. Rao will undoubtedly bounce back with something better because he is too talented an actor to stay bogged down in material this flat, but this particular entry in his filmography is going to take up space on a hard drive somewhere and little else. The direction lacks the specific, grubby texture that made something like Badlapur actually stick in your ribs for days afterward, settling instead for a glossy, commercial sheen that hides the hollow center of the narrative. Even the title feels like it was workshopped by a focus group that didn't know what a subtitle was for, promising a franchise that nobody with any sense of self-preservation will be eager to line up for once the streaming window opens and people can watch it at double speed while folding their laundry.