Saif Ali Khan squints against the North Indian dust and tries to look like a man who eats country liquor for breakfast, but his forehead is too clean. The hair has that high-maintenance blow-dry sheen that belongs in a Bandra loft rather than a scorched sugarcane field in Jaunpur, which is a small thing to fixate on perhaps, but it bugged me from the very first frame where he's supposed to be hiding out from local muscle. Tigmanshu Dhulia directs his actors like he wishes he was still making plays for a Delhi university circuit where the dialogue does all the heavy lifting and the budget is mostly spent on cheap chai. There is a stubborn, abrasive friction to the way these scenes are cut together, lurching from sun-drenched violence to indoor dialogue exchanges that look like they were lit by a single desk lamp and a dream. The screenplay keeps losing its footing every time it remembers it has to be a masala potboiler rather than a dry, cynical character study about UP goons who read poetry between extortions. It's not great, not bad, just there, dragging its feet through three separate shootouts that all seem to happen against the exact same brick wall with the exact same crumbling plaster.

Jimmy Sheirgill plays the loyal friend who gets dragged into the dirt because he doesn't know how to say no, and he wears that anxious, hunted expression so naturally you start to wonder if he just lives in a state of permanent mild dread during shooting schedules. He has this one scene in a dilapidated police station where he's supposed to be negotiating his own survival while nursing a split lip, and he does this tiny, distracted thing with his thumbnail that tells you everything about his character's internal collapse without needing a single voiceover to explain it. Then there is Irrfan Khan, wandering through the second half like a stray cat who accidentally walked onto a very loud Hindi film set and decided to stay just to see what everyone was yelling about. Irrfan doesn't act here; he kind of just inhabits the background noise with a dry, world-weary smirk that makes everyone else look terribly sweaty and desperate. He reminds me of his performance in Paan Singh Tomar, though he has significantly less room to breathe here because the script keeps shoving him into rooms with men who insist on shouting their threats directly into the camera lens. He delivers lines about political alliances and state elections as if he is reading the ingredients off a shampoo bottle, entirely unbothered by the gunfire erupting three feet away from his ear. Gulshan Grover shows up as the obligatory oily politician whose suits always look two sizes too large, sweating through his collars while trying to broker peace between factions that only know how to communicate through lead and crude insults.

Sonakshi Sinha gets cast as the prop with feelings, a Bengali girl who wanders into the chaos simply to provide Saif with someone to gaze at soulfully while the background score swells with aggressive percussion. She stands by the window of a dusty safe house in one sequence, looking genuinely bewildered by the surrounding pyrotechnics, and I couldn't entirely blame her. The camera pans around her face three times too many during her solitary song sequence, lingering on her expression of mild distress as if waiting for a tear that never quite arrives. It's a classic Bollywood movie problem where the romantic lead exists in a completely different atmospheric pressure system from the blood-spattered gangsters surrounding her. When she tries to look fierce and tell Saif to put his gun down, her voice drops an octave in that rehearsed, dramatic way that makes you wish Dhulia had just let her mumble her lines naturally instead of coaching her to sound like she was reciting an oath at a district collector's office. She and Saif have zero chemistry, rattling off their dialogue with the rhythmic stiffness of two strangers stuck in an elevator waiting for the maintenance crew.

The action sequences are staged with a strange, jittery lethargy that tries to look like Martin Scorsese but ends up feeling like an over-caffeinated local television commercial for a cement brand. Bodies fly backward through wooden tables whenever someone so much as pokes them in the chest, and the sound design insists on adding a wet crunch to every single punch regardless of whether it actually connected with a jaw. I found myself getting mildly annoyed by the recurring needle-drop of the main theme song, which blasts through the speakers every time Saif puts on his sunglasses or walks slowly out of a cloud of exhaust fumes. It plays at least six times in the first hour alone, wearing out its welcome long before the intermission brings any actual narrative momentum. The cinematography alternates between sun-bleached wide shots of rural vistas that look genuinely striking and muddy, over-lit indoor confrontations where you can clearly see the boom mic dipping into the top edge of the frame. Hindi movies have long struggled with finding the balance between grit and gloss, often falling into this weird middle ground where the dirt looks fake and the glamour feels cheap.

We are told through heavy-handed exposition that these men are fighting for caste supremacy and political turf, but the movie never actually makes you feel the weight of those social hierarchies beyond a few characters shouting about their surnames during fistfights. The themes of opportunism and the rot at the center of small-town democracy get buried under too many slow-motion entries and forced camaraderie. It wants to be a scathing commentary on the criminalization of local politics, yet it keeps pausing to let its leading man deliver punchy one-liners that belong in a completely different decade of commercial cinema. By the time the central conflict shifts toward Lucknow and the state legislature, the plot has become such a tangled mess of double-crosses and forgotten alliances that you stop caring who is paying off whom. There is an interesting movie buried somewhere beneath the swagger and the flying bullets, a cynical little picture about small-time hoods who overestimate their own cleverness until the bigger fish swallow them whole, but it got lost somewhere in the editing room while someone was busy turning up the bass on the soundtrack.