Jackie Shroff wears a Nehru jacket that looks like it cost more than the catering budget for the first two schedules combined. He spends a significant portion of his screen time in this film peering over the top of antique spectacles with an expression that suggests he just remembered leaving the gas stove burning back in Delhi. It is a specific kind of world-weariness that only a veteran working actor of a certain vintage can pull off without completely checking out. Bollywood has spent decades churning out stories about corrupt politicians who chew the scenery until their jaw muscles cramp, yet Shroff manages to keep his performance low-key enough that you almost forget you are watching a melodrama about murder and extortion.

The direction by K.C. Bokadia feels less like an artistic vision and more like someone frantically shoveling coal into an engine that threw a piston five miles back. The script lurches from one conspiratorial meeting in a wood-paneled office to another screeching confrontation on a dusty highway with very little regard for narrative geography. Characters appear in frames without motivation or logical trajectory, wandering through rooms while background score elements thud like wet sand hitting a tarp. It lacks the polish of contemporary Hindi films that obsess over color grading and gimbal stability, choosing instead to lean hard into a dusty, over-lit aesthetic that recalls afternoon broadcasts on state television from the late nineties.

Mallika Sherawat is tasked with anchoring this wreckage as Anokhi Devi, a small-town dancer turned political heavyweight whose rise and fall mirrors several notorious real-life scandals that dominated front pages years ago. She throws herself into the part with a frantic energy, though she is frequently let down by dialogue that treats subtlety like a personal insult. There is a scene near the middle where she has to deliver a speech about betrayal to a crowd of extras who look like they were pulled off the street five minutes before rolling, and she manages to invest the hollow lines with a strange, bruised sincerity that almost pulls the picture out of its nosedive. She works harder than the material deserves, sweating through silk sarees while supporting players phone in their reactions from somewhere near craft services.

The supporting roster is an absolute graveyard of talent, packed with names that make you wonder what kind of tax debt or contractual obligation brought them to the set. Anupam Kher and Om Puri share a couple of scenes where they talk over each other in low growls, and while it is impossible to call their work bad, it is also undeniably work done for a paycheck. Atul Kulkarni pops up as an investigating officer who narrows his eyes at documents with terrifying intensity, and Sushant Singh plays a heavy whose primary mode of expression is aggressive chewing of paan. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how often the sound design drops out completely during these dialogue exchanges, leaving a dead silence that makes every mouth movement sound like an audio book recording done in a walk-in closet.

Cinematographer Pappu Verma shoots everything from angles that make normal-sized rooms look like aircraft hangars, often letting the camera drift lazily during close-ups as if the operator lost their balance. The lighting design relies heavily on stark key lights that cast sharp shadows across foreheads, turning every dramatic confrontation into something resembling a high school production of Macbeth. When the narrative shifts to rural backdrops, the color saturation gets dialed up to an aggressive yellow that hurts the eyes, contrasting sharply with the murky interiors of government buildings where nobody apparently knows how to operate a dimmer switch.

Beneath the bluster of the plot sits an obvious attempt to comment on the commodification of female ambition within patriarchal power structures, though the film is far too clumsy to actually articulate any of that. The script treats its central figure as both a victim of predatory men and an opportunistic operator willing to step over corpses to secure a ministerial bungalow, but it lacks the moral clarity to make either perspective land with any real force. This isn't the first time hindi movies have tackled dirty politics, and compared to something like Govind Nihalani's Tazaa or even Prakash Jha's more polished outings, this project feels hopelessly dated in its understanding of how power actually operates on the ground.

Rajpal Yadav shows up for roughly four minutes in the second half as a pan-chewing aide, delivers two jokes that sound like they were recycled from a nineties stage play, and vanishes from the narrative without a trace. His inclusion makes zero sense in terms of plot mechanics, yet his brief, hyperventilating presence provides a weird sort of punctuation to a stretch of the movie that would otherwise be entirely composed of men shouting at each other across wide mahogany desks. It is messy in a way that feels increasingly rare in modern studio releases, preferring chaotic noise to calculated precision.

There is an abruptness to the editing that suggests scenes were tossed into a bin and reassembled by someone who had a flight to catch. Characters leave rooms through doors on the left and enter the next shot from the right of an entirely different building, creating a geography of nonsense that forces you to abandon any hope of geographical coherence. Naseeruddin Shah walks through his brief cameo with the distracted air of a man trying to remember if he locked his car, lending the proceedings a bizarrely authentic flavor of bureaucratic indifference.

Govind Namdeo completes the gallery of grizzled faces, playing a rival politician with a permanent sneer that seems glued to his cheek. His confrontations with Sherawat lack the crackle they need to generate real tension, mostly because the sound effects department decided to underline every minor insult with a bass-heavy thud that sounds like someone dropping a toolbox on a hardwood floor. It is a loud, unpleasant experience that tests your patience long before the credits finally stagger onto the screen.

If I'm honest, the whole enterprise has the desperate smell of a vanity project that lost its financing halfway through principal photography and had to be duct-taped together with leftover footage. It stumbles through its runtime without ever finding a steady rhythm, falling back on recycled tropes whenever the plot threatens to stall out completely. You leave the theater with a ringing in your ears and a vague resentment toward anyone who ever suggested that cinema should be used as a mirror for society.