Abhishek Bachchan chewing on a toothpick while trying to conjugate a basic Hindi verb is about as close as this thing gets to a genuine comic rhythm, which is to say it is an acquired taste that takes a solid forty minutes to stop feeling awkward. Tushar Jalota directing his debut feature leans hard on the sort of broad, middle-brow satire that feels like it was written in a writers' room where nobody was allowed to drink coffee after two in the afternoon. The screenplay by Ritesh Shah, Ram Kumar, and Pooja Tolani tries to mix Munna Bhai style redemption with a heavy-handed swipe at the Indian penal system, and if I'm honest, it rarely decides whether it wants to be a goofy caper about an illiterate politician cramming for his high school exams or a searing indictment of political corruption. Gangaram Chaudhary is sitting in a posh cell with air conditioning, a television, and enough clout to run the state government by proxy, until a righteous new superintendent played by Yami Gautam arrives and ruins the whole setup by making him actually obey the rules. It's a premise with legs, or at least ankles, but the execution keeps stumbling over its own desire to be lovable when it really ought to have some actual bite.

Abhishek has this specific walk now, shoulders dropped and chin slightly tucked, that he used to great effect in Manmarziyaan, and he deploys it here to suggest a man whose power is entirely physical until the moment he has to open a textbook and stare at a map of India. He plays Ganga with a gravelly, self-satisfied swagger that eventually crumbles into a kind of desperate, petulant puppy-fat vulnerability when the math equations start getting complicated. You buy him as a politician who hasn't read a single page since ninth grade, mostly because he doesn't try to make the guy sympathetic too fast. Yami Gautam, on the other hand, is stuck playing the immovable object to his deeply corrupt force of nature, and her character is written with such severe, unblinking righteousness that she basically exists to cross her arms and look sternly at paperwork. She doesn't get to have much fun, which is a shame because she showed in Vicky Donor that she can handle deadpan comedy without needing a background score to tell the audience she's being impressive.

Nimrat Kaur has the showier role as the ambitious wife who takes over the chief minister's chair while her husband is locked up, and she bites into the costume jewellery and the power suits with a relish that borders on the cartoonish. She starts out whimpering behind a veil and ends up barking orders at seasoned bureaucrats, and while the trajectory is predictable, watching her figure out how to misuse state funds while wearing pastel silk is moderately entertaining. Manu Rishi Chadha shows up as the long-suffering jailor who has spent twenty years learning how to bend without snapping, bringing a weary, world-weary sigh to scenes that might otherwise have drifted entirely into farce. The supporting actors in these kinds of Hindi films often do the heavy lifting of making a fictional town feel lived-in, and the various inmates shuffling around the courtyard add a texture that the slicker scenes in the CM's office completely lack. There is a running gag about an illiterate cellmate who helps Ganga with his Hindi homework that works better than half the political satire because it stays small, focusing on the sheer embarrassment of a grown man who has never had to say please or thank you to a dictionary.

The cinematography by Sachin K. Krishn is aggressively digital, full of those flat, overlit jail corridors that make everything look like it was shot inside an uninspired corporate headquarters on a Sunday. Every time Ganga sits down to study under a harsh tubelight, the camera lingers on his sweat-beaded forehead for three beats longer than necessary, as if the director is terrified you might miss the profound metaphor of a bad man learning good grammar. Sachin-Jigar's soundtrack hits you over the head with folk-inflected beats every single time a character has a realization about their place in the universe, and there is this one percussion loop that repeats so often during the study montages that I started hearing it in my left ear hours after the laptop was shut. It is a small thing, sure, but repetitive audio cues in a two-hour comedy can turn a mild annoyance into a throbbing migraine if you aren't careful. The editing by A. Sreekar Prasad tries to keep the pacing snappy, yet the second half bogs down in a series of courtroom speeches and emotional breakthroughs that belong in a completely different movie.

Bollywood movies have a long and somewhat exhausting tradition of reforming the rogue through the magic of basic literacy, a trope that goes back decades without changing its fundamental moral math very much. You learn your vowels, you pass your boards, and suddenly you are a fit leader for the people, as though a high school diploma were an absolute vaccine against pocketing public funds for a new mansion. Dasvi wants to suggest that education is the great equalizer, but it keeps undermining its own thesis by making Ganga's eventual enlightenment feel like a cheat code rather than a hard-won intellectual awakening. The social commentary on caste and privilege pops up every twenty minutes or so, usually delivered by Yami Gautam in a tone that suggests she is reading an editorial from a morning daily while standing over a sink. It never gets deep enough to ruffle any feathers, preferring to stay safely within the bounds of a streaming-friendly entertainer that families can watch while eating dinner without anyone getting too uncomfortable about actual politics.

Abhishek Bachchan has always been a more interesting actor when he is allowed to play slightly ridiculous, middle-aged men who are slightly out of their depth, rather than the alpha-male heroes he was pushed into during his earlier years. Dasvi fits him like a slightly rumpled linen shirt that has been through the wash too many times, comfortable around the elbows and a bit tight across the chest. Jalota's direction lacks a distinct visual signature, relying on standard-issue coverage and reaction shots to stitch together a narrative that needed a sharper, meaner edge to truly land its satirical punches. It is not a disaster, nor is it a wasted evening, sitting somewhere in that vast, grey middle tier of streaming content that fills up the algorithms on Friday afternoons. By the time Ganga walks out of those iron gates with his heavy book bag, you feel like you have spent two hours with people who mean well even if they couldn't quite figure out how to finish their sentences without a cliché.