Jimmy Sheirgill wears a heavy brown jacket throughout most of Dhaval Gandhi’s Collar Bomb that looks like it cost thirty bucks at a roadside stall in Versova, and if I’m honest, that jacket carries more emotional weight than half the dialogue in the script. It is the kind of mid-budget OTT thriller that drops quietly onto a streaming platform on a Friday with zero fanfare, occupying that strange digital middle ground where actors who deserve better than the second lead in a big-budget theatrical get a chance to sweat under fluorescent lights for ninety unbroken minutes. Hindi films have spent the last few years trying to outrun the ghost of the formulaic whodunit by adding social messaging and glossy drone shots, but this one just keeps things small and damp, sticking close to a single police station and a schoolbus wired with explosives.

The plotting moves with the breathless urgency of a screenplay that knows it is running out of money before the third act can really breathe. A masked teenager walks into a school full of children, straps a heavy metal collar loaded with RDX around the neck of the local headmistress, and demands that Sheirgill’s disgraced Senior Inspector Manoj Huda dance to a very specific, humiliating tune involving disgraced cops and old grudges. Asha Negi shows up as an investigating officer who spends most of her screen time staring at computer monitors with the kind of grim determination usually reserved for actors who have three other shifts booked on different sets that same afternoon. Dhaval Gandhi directs with a heavy hand, pushing the camera into tight close-ups every time a character raises their voice, which happens roughly every four minutes. There is no room for air in the frame, and the editing by Chandan Arora cuts away from dialogue beats a fraction too early, clipping the tail ends of sentences in a way that feels less like stylistic tension and more like someone got lazy in post-production.

Let’s talk about that sound design for a second, because it’s a small thing that bugged me all the way through: every time a character draws a pistol, the Foley artist drops a metallic cocking sound that is easily twice as loud as the dialogue track, even if the gun is just sitting inside a holster made of cheap canvas. It happens three times in the first twenty minutes alone, and once you hear it, you can't unhear it. Sheirgill himself plays Huda with the weary resignation of a man who realized halfway through the shoot that his character arc was just a Xerox copy of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s work in Kahani, minus the coastal grit and the cigarettes. He has this one specific eye twitch he deploys whenever someone mentions his estranged family, and while it works the first couple of times, it starts to look like a nervous tic he picked up while waiting for his vanity van to cool down during the peak summer schedule in Himachal.

Rajshri Deshpande has barely twenty minutes of actual screen time, yet she manages to anchor the emotional core of the film simply by refusing to overplay the terror of having a bomb strapped to her jugular. When she speaks, her voice stays flat and level, refusing to drop into the hysterical shrieking that lower-grade Hindi movies usually demand from female actors caught in hostage scenarios. The cinematography by Amalendu Chaudhary leans heavily into a palette of bruised purples and sickly greens that makes the entire town look like it was scrubbed with disinfectant after a chemical spill. It works for the mood, though it occasionally turns the actors' faces into waxy lumps when the natural light from the classroom windows fails to match the artificial fill coming from the left of the lens. The soundtrack, composed by a rotating cast of obscure producers, relies on heavy percussion that pounds away during chase scenes that barely cover fifty feet of corridor space.

We are supposed to care about the moral rot of the police force, a theme that bollywood movies trot out with the regularity of a commuter train, but the screenplay by Nikhil Nair treats systemic corruption like an administrative inconvenience rather than a tragedy. Huda isn't a complex antihero so much as a guy who had a bad Tuesday ten years ago and has been whining about it ever since. The villain, when he finally takes off his mask, delivers a monologue about societal neglect that sounds like it was clipped from an undergraduate essay on late capitalism, read aloud with the enthusiasm of a college student trying to finish his presentation before the bell rings. There is a strange lack of geography to the whole affair. The school is somewhere in Himachal Pradesh, yet nobody ever wears a heavy sweater despite the snow visible on the peaks in the background, a wardrobe oversight that keeps pulling your attention away from the ticking digital timer on the bomb.

Action sequences are shot in shaky-cam close-ups that obscure who is punching whom, a classic technique for hiding the fact that the stunt doubles are twice the age of the actors they are doubling for. Negi has a foot chase through a muddy marketplace that cuts between six different focal lengths in three seconds, making it impossible to tell whether she is gaining on her suspect or running in circles around a vegetable cart. It lacks the physical precision that made a film like Kaminey feel dangerous and alive, settling instead for the plastic crunch of modern digital fight choreography.

The ending arrives with a loud thud rather than a twist, resolving a moral dilemma by simply having the characters shoot their way out of it because the budget for the explosives truck was apparently running low. Sheirgill stands in the middle of a dusty courtyard, his leather jacket slightly damp with sweat, staring off into the middle distance while the credits roll over a generic electric guitar riff. It is a movie that fills a ninety-minute gap on a Tuesday evening when you have already scrolled through everything else in the new releases tab and refuse to start a ten-episode limited series about Scandinavian detectives. You watch it, you forget the names of the secondary characters before the screen goes black, and you move on to making tea.