Prakash Raj pronounces a certain villainous name with a wet, exaggerated curl of the lip that starts out mildly amusing and eventually just sits there like an uninvited guest who refuses to check his coat. If I'm honest, the whole enterprise leans heavily on that kind of heavy-handed theatricality, dragging a classic 1973 property through the exhausting wringer of modern commercial machinery without ever deciding whether it wants to be an affectionate homage or a completely new beast.

Apurva Lakhia directs with an obvious desire to keep things moving fast, but the screenplay by Kanika Dhillon keeps tripping over its own feet whenever it tries to ground Ram Charan's stony-faced cop in anything resembling a real human emotion. You get long stretches of heavy dialogue designed to make the hero look brooding and intense, punctuated by action sequences where cars flip through the air with the weightless indifference of plastic toys, which makes it feel awfully similar to that messy remake of Agneepath from a few years back where everyone shouted their lines until their veins bulged.

Ram Charan plays ACP Vijay Khanna with all the expressive range of a granite countertop, rarely changing his facial expression whether he is listening to a briefing or watching his mentor die in a pool of aggressively red corn syrup. It is a performance that requires you to project an entire inner life onto a pair of aviator sunglasses, and while that worked wonders for Amitabh Bachchan four decades ago because of the sheer coiled tension of his frame, here it just feels like the actor is perpetually waiting for someone to yell cut so he can check his phone. He moves through the frames like a bored bouncer who knows he is never going to be asked to actually throw anyone out of the club.

Priyanka Chopra does what she can with a character written mostly to giggle at inappropriate moments and look concerned while wearing brightly colored sundresses, though her chemistry with the leading man is so nonexistent that they might as well be acting in different time zones entirely. Sanjay Dutt shows up late in the game as Sher Khan, sporting a beard that looks glued on by a very tired intern and chewing scenery with the kind of desperate enthusiasm you usually see from actors who have realized halfway through shooting that the paycheck might bounce. Mahie Gill tries to inject some actual menace into her role as Mona, but the direction keeps cutting away from her best moments to focus on yet another slow-motion close-up of a boot crushing gravel.

The cinematography relies on a murky, blue-tinted digital palette that makes Mumbai look like it was filmed entirely inside a damp refrigerator, draining every frame of the kinetic dirt that made the original Hindi movies of that era feel dangerous to watch. Chirantan Bhatt's soundtrack suffers from an affliction common to modern Bollywood soundtracks, which is that every single background cue has to sound like a Hans Zimmer outtake even when two people are just standing in a dull kitchen discussing where to hide some stolen ledgers. It is loud, it is constantly vibrating your seat cushions, and it manages the impressive feat of being totally unmemorable despite its volume.

Beneath the bluster, the narrative attempts to grapple with the corruption of contemporary urban life and the moral rot of the oil mafia, but it treats these subjects with the depth of a cheap comic book left out in the rain. There is a small thing about the sound mixing that bugged me all the way through, specifically the way every punch sounds like a wet sack of flour hitting a wooden pallet no matter what surface the actors are actually tumbling onto. You find yourself focusing on tiny mechanical errors like that because the broader ideological struggle between individual integrity and systemic decay is handled with such staggering banality that looking at the wallpaper becomes more engaging than listening to the monologues.

By discarding the brooding psychological claustrophobia that actually made the vigilante archetype interesting in older hindi films, this version turns a haunted man into a standard-issue action figure who dispenses justice with a sneer and a well-timed roundhouse kick. It is not a complete disaster, but it suffers from a strange, hollow flatness that stays with you long after the credits have finally stopped scrolling across the screen.