John Abraham spends the first twenty minutes of Rocky Handsome chewing on a toothpick with the dogged commitment of a man trying to extract flavor from a block of cedar. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because he does it while staring into the middle distance with his jaw clenched so hard you can practically hear his molars cracking under the strain of being the most dangerous pawn shop owner in Goa. Or maybe it was a pawn shop in Mumbai, because the geography of this movie shifts around whenever the director needs an alleyway narrow enough for a guy to throw someone through a stack of plastic crates without anyone in the background noticing. Hindi films have long had a complicated relationship with spatial logic, but this one takes it to a place where you just stop asking how the hero got from a shady nightclub to an industrial dockyard in the span of a single musical cue. You just sit back and watch the limbs snap, which happens with a frequency that suggests the local orthopedic surgeons must be making an absolute killing.

Nishikant Kamat directs with the steady hand of a man who watched The Man from Nowhere three times on a long-haul flight and decided he could pull off the same trick if he just pumped up the bass on every punch. He plays the villain too, a glassy-eyed drug lord named Kevin who wears silk shirts that look like they cost more than the lighting budget for the safehouse scenes. Kamat has a quiet menace that works surprisingly well when he is just sitting behind a desk slicing an apple with a switchblade while his brothers scream at each other about lost shipments. The screenplay, adapted by Ritesh Shah, doesn't bother with much dialogue for the hero, which is probably for the best given how John Abraham handles anything longer than a five-word threat. He operates on pure physical weight, moving through rooms like a refrigerator being pushed down a flight of stairs. It is loud, it is heavy, and it lacks the slick choreography you might expect from a modern action flick, favoring instead a brutal, grappling-heavy style where guys are choked out with heavy chains and thrown against concrete pillars until the dust flakes off their jackets.

Shruti Haasan shows up in the opening reel as the pregnant wife whose sole narrative purpose is to smile under soft golden-hour lighting before getting violently removed from the plot so the hero can have a reason to frown for the next two hours. It is an impossible role that requires her to be both radiant and doomed, and she handles it with the weary professionalism of someone who knows she is cashing a paycheck for three days of work on a beach. When she dies, the movie takes a hard left turn into vigilante territory, and that is where the tone gets genuinely weird. The violence escalates from standard street brawls to full-on torture sessions involving liquid nitrogen and power tools, shot with a blueish tint that makes every room look like a municipal swimming pool after hours. There is no joy in the carnage, which separates this from the usual flavor of Bollywood action where the hero pauses to crack a joke after drop-kicking a stuntman through a stained-glass window. Abraham doesn't crack jokes. He just breathes heavily through his nose and twists arms until the sound design department can let loose with a wet crunch that makes you want to check your own elbows.

The supporting cast features a rotating collection of goons who exist purely to be hurled over balconies or impaled on stray rebar. Sharad Kelkar pops up as the primary enforcer, sporting a mohawk and a permanent scowl that suggests he regrets agreeing to the part the moment he saw the stunt coordination schedule. The soundtrack by Sunny Bawra and Inder Bawra leans heavily on electronic drones and distorted guitar riffs that sound like they were pulled straight from a bargain-bin video game trailer. It pounds away during the fight sequences with relentless enthusiasm, drowning out whatever sparse dialogue is left on the cutting room floor. The cinematography by Pratik Shah has this strange, oversaturated sheen where every drop of sweat looks digitally enhanced and every blood splatter hits the lens with the heavy-handed obviousness of a first-year film student trying to mimic David Fincher on a shoestring budget.

What saves the movie from being a complete slog through generic brutality is the weirdly tender dynamic between Abraham and the little girl next door, played by Diya Chalwad. She brings him bowls of questionable curry and chatters away about nothing while he stares at her with the blank expression of a man who forgot how human beings interact before the screenplay started. It is sentimental garbage, if I'm honest, but it works because Abraham doesn't try to act his way through it; he just stands there letting her braid his hair or paint his fingernails while the camera lingers on his biceps. That weird contrast between domestic babysitting and throat-slitting defines the entire viewing experience. Hindi movies have always liked their heroes to possess a split personality, balancing the role of the devoted family man with that of the merciless executioner, but Kamat plays it so straight that it circles back around to being fascinating. You are watching a man with the emotional range of a granite countertop try to convey profound grief through the medium of throwing drug dealers into industrial washing machines.

The climax takes place in a multi-story parking garage because every action film made after 2010 legally has to conclude in a concrete box with flickering fluorescent lights. The hand-to-hand combat here is relentless, stripped of wide shots, relying entirely on shaky close-ups that make it occasionally difficult to tell which bald henchman is currently getting his windpipe crushed. Abraham takes a ridiculous amount of damage, absorbing stab wounds and heavy pipe blows that would have put a normal human into a coma, yet he keeps lumbering forward like a Terminator built out of creatine and bad intentions. By the time he finally corners the main villain in a damp basement, the script has completely run out of plot and is just coasting on pure muscle memory. There is no grand moral reckoning at the end, no speech about the decay of society or the police force being corrupt, just a tired guy in a leather jacket walking away into the rain while the credits drop over a final, lingering shot of a child's drawing left on a kitchen table.