That specific lens flare right in the middle of a serious conversation about police corruption is something else entirely. If I am being honest, Ram Gopal Varma has shot half of Department through a cheesecloth soaked in grease or something similarly distracting. You sit there in the dark trying to track who is shooting at whom across a crumbling concrete courtyard in Mumbai, and suddenly there is a violet slash of light splitting the frame diagonally for no earthly reason. It is hard to stay anchored in a narrative when the camera feels like it is having a panic attack.

The plot concerns the messy underbelly of law enforcement where extrajudicial killings are outsourced to a specialized squad. Sanjay Dutt plays Mahadev Bhosle, an aging encounter specialist whose hair is dyed a stark, uncompromising jet black that catches the studio lights in ways that distract from his brooding glares. He moves through these grim corridors with the heavy tread of a man who has spent two decades playing the exact same weary cop in various iterations across the landscape of hindi movies, yet here he seems particularly tired. He does not yell. He growls through clenched teeth while staring at water coolers and peeling wallpaper.

Beside him stands Rana Daggubati as Shiv Narayan, a fresh recruit who enters the system with idealistic notions about due process before the editing room cuts him to ribbons. Daggubati has a formidable physical presence, standing head and shoulders over the frantic extras playing low-level gangsters, but the screenplay gives him nothing resembling an internal life. He simply goes from upright citizen to trigger-happy vigilante in the span of two scenes that appear to have been edited with a chainsaw. Amitabh Bachchan arrives much later as Sarjerao Gaikwad, a politician operating from the shadows with a walking stick and a voice that could curdle milk. He wears dark glasses indoors and delivers his lines as if he is reading a grocery list written in ancient Sanskrit, imbuing mundane dialogue about land acquisition with an apocalyptic weight.

The cinematography relies almost exclusively on dutch angles and rapid-fire zooms that jerk back and forth until your eyes hurt. It is a visual strategy designed to simulate chaos, but it mostly creates a profound sense of seasickness. Characters pace across rooms while the camera circles them on a frantic dolly track, stopping only to punch into an extreme close-up of an eyeball or a sweating forehead. There is an over-reliance on slow motion during routine foot chases through garbage-strewn alleys, stretching out moments of utter banality into agonizing slow-motion ballets set to heavy synthesized bass drops that sound like a lawnmower stuck in mud.

Music supervisors often struggle when a director loses all sense of pacing, and the background score here is a relentless assault of electronic wails and distorted vocal chants that never let up for a single second. Even during quiet exchanges in damp interrogation rooms where two officers are merely discussing tea, the soundtrack pulses with the urgency of an impending nuclear strike. It completely flattens the dramatic stakes. When everything is loud and desperate, nothing actually carries any weight.

Anjana Sukhani and Madhu Shalini pop up in brief, utterly underwritten roles as the requisite romantic interests who exist primarily to look concerned near windows. They are given nothing to do except answer phones and look worried while the men shout at each other about jurisdiction and territorial dominance. It is a recurring flaw in many commercial hindi films where the female characters function as set dressing rather than active agents in the carnage, though here it feels especially pronounced due to the choppy, fractured narrative structure that leaves entire subplots dangling in mid-air.

Vijay Raaz makes a fleeting appearance as a cowering informant, bringing a brief flash of genuine nervous energy to a scene that would otherwise be completely lifeless. He uses his hands to punctuate every stuttering sentence, darting his eyes toward the corners of the room as if expecting a sniper bullet at any moment. It is a small masterclass in micro-acting that highlights how hollow the surrounding performances feel by comparison. Naseeruddin Shah is also floating around somewhere near the edges of the frame as an underworld kingpin, though he mostly seems to be reciting his lines while mentally calculating his paycheck.

Comparing this messy endeavor to Ram Gopal Varma's earlier, much tighter work like Company reveals how far his aesthetic has drifted from grounded storytelling into self-parody. Where that 2002 classic used silence and lingering spatial awareness to build tension between rival mobsters, this new venture substitutes genuine menace for rapid-fire editing and endless smoke machines. The grit feels artificial, sprayed onto clean sets with a prop gun.

The supporting cast features Deepak Tijori and Abhimanyu Shekhar Singh as rival faction members who snarl menacingly at one another across long mahogany tables, yet their motivations remain entirely opaque. One minute they are shaking down local shopkeepers, and the next they are executing high-ranking ministers in broad daylight without any apparent fear of consequence. The narrative logic collapses under the weight of its own posturing.

There is a specific sound effect used every time a character draws a pistol—a metallic metallic ring that echoes like a church bell—and it repeats at least four times in every single action sequence until it becomes genuinely comical. You start counting the seconds between draws just to pass the time during the endless shootouts that fill the second half. It is a small thing, but it bugged me from the very first reel.

By the time the closing credits finally flash across the screen over a chaotic montage of discarded shell casings and slow-motion blood splatters, there is a distinct feeling of emptiness rather than exhaustion. The actors tried their best with material that feels like a rough first draft hastily scribbled on a napkin, but the relentless stylistic posturing buries every human element beneath layers of digital glare and obnoxious sound design.