Brendan Fraser wears a trench coat in New Delhi that looks like it cost twelve dollars at a railway station stall, and honestly, the way it drags through the mud during the second-act ambush tells you everything you need to know about the production's approach to texture. There is something profoundly strange about watching an Oscar winner try to ground an American insurance investigator wandering around a sprawling family drama set in India, mostly because nobody on set seems quite sure whether he is supposed to be playing a noir archetype or a confused tourist who took a very wrong turn off the Ring Road. Rohit Karn Hickroyd wrote and directed the whole mess, which is a phrase that usually precedes a groan from anyone who spent a rainy Tuesday afternoon wading through his previous shorts, but here the ambition is so loud and clumsy that you almost have to admire the sheer audacity of the collision between gritty Hollywood procedural tropes and the high-end melodrama typical of many modern Hindi films that try to cross over into international markets without changing their underwear.

The plot itself revolves around three brothers fighting over an old man's failing logistics empire, though calling it an empire is generous when half the exterior shots feature a couple of rusty shipping containers and a stray goat chewing on a cardboard box. Prem Chopra plays the patriarch, sitting in a leather armchair that has seen better decades, barking orders at descendants who look like they would rather be anywhere else on earth, especially during the endless dining table confrontations where the dialogue sounds like it was translated from English to Marathi and back via a faulty search engine. Abhay Deol shows up as the eldest sibling carrying the weight of the family debts and a permanent scowl that suggests he hasn't slept since the Lok Sabha elections, and he actually manages to squeeze some genuine pathos out of scenes where he is just staring blankly at a bowl of dal getting cold in front of him. Hickroyd lets these domestic standoffs drag on far longer than any narrative logic permits, letting the camera linger on a tear rolling down a cheek or a knuckle turning white around a glass of scotch until you forget what they were even arguing about.

There is a specific kind of low-budget grit that usually saves this sort of transnational thriller from drowning in its own pretensions, but the cinematography here swings wildly between sun-drenched drone shots of traffic snarls that look like stock footage and muddy handheld interior work where half the actors are standing in shadow. It's a small thing but it bugged me how the boom mic dips into the upper corner of the frame during a crucial shouting match in a stairwell, right near the third floor landing, and nobody bothered to fix it in post-production because the entire budget probably went toward flying Fraser in from Los Angeles. The soundtrack doesn't help matters, leaning heavily on a synthesizer bassline that pumps away during quiet conversations between uncles about property deeds, creating an accidental comedy effect that rivals Al Pacino's early work in terms of misplaced intensity.

Comparisons to The Departed are inevitable given the undercover angles and the sibling rivalry, but this movie lacks the greasy momentum of Martin Scorsese's picture, moving more like a sluggish train stuck on a rusted track somewhere outside of Kanpur. Fraser delivers his lines with a weary detachment that feels less like seasoned professionalism and more like a man reading his grocery list off a palm pilot while dodging auto-rickshaws, which creates a jarring friction whenever he has to share a scene with domestic actors who are sweating blood to make the exposition sound like real human speech. It is not great, not bad, just there, hanging around the edges of your attention span like an uninvited cousin sleeping on the sofa for three weeks too long.

Bollywood movies have often struggled when trying to graft Western noir cynicism onto traditional family structures, and Line of Descent falls into that exact trap by assuming that adding an American face and some English swearing will somehow modernize a story that has been told better on Doordarshan serials from thirty years ago. The themes of generational rot and sibling betrayal get buried under so many car chases through narrow alleys that by the time the surviving relatives finally sit down to divide the scraps, you stopped caring which brother poisoned the tea. When the credits finally roll, there is no grand thematic revelation, just a sudden black screen that cuts off a character mid-sentence because they probably ran out of film stock or money for the sound mix.