Suniel Shetty wears a grey beard through the first half of Mission Istanbul that looks like it was glued on by a stressed continuity supervisor who had five minutes before lunch and half a pot of spirit gum left. You stare at the edges of the lace whenever the camera pushes in for a dramatic whisper, which is often, because everyone in this movie whispers when they are supposed to be shouting over the roar of a helicopter or the sound of an entire city collapsing into low-budget digital smoke. It is a small thing, sure, but it bugged me from the very second he walked onto the Turkish tarmac looking less like a rogue intelligence operative and more like a high school principal who lost his luggage at a holiday resort.

Apoorva Lakhia directs with a relentless, twitchy sort of energy that makes you feel as though someone has slipped four shots of espresso into your popcorn butter while you weren't looking. He wants desperately to match the kinetic weight of the Bourne sequels, shooting fights with a handheld rig that shakes so violently you could probably generate electricity from the operator's elbows. There is a car chase near the Bosphorus that goes on for about ten minutes too long, bouncing between badly matched angles and stunt doubles who don't even attempt to look like Zayed Khan from behind. Khan plays Vikas Sagar, a disgraced journalist who takes a job with an evil news network run by Vivek Oberoi, and his performance consists largely of running through narrow alleyways while wearing very tight designer shirts that somehow remain completely unwrinkled despite repeated explosions and moderate water damage. Oberoi tries to inject some actual menace into Al Ghazi, the media mogul who broadcasts terrorist attacks for profit, but he is constantly undercut by dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a video game manual using an offline dictionary from 1998.

Shriya Saran shows up as a doctor who mostly exists to look concerned while men yell at each other in high-ceilinged offices decorated with cheap leather furniture. She gets very little to do other than hold a stethoscope and occasionally drive a jeep through a fruit market, which feels like a waste of the genuine screen presence she brought to something like Sivaji the Boss years ago. Shabbir Ahluwalia plays a trigger-happy mercenary with frosted tips and a permanent sneer that suggests he is currently chewing on a piece of very tough beef jerky he cannot quite dislodge from his back molars. Then there is Nikitin Dheer, standing in the background of every single confrontation looking like a giant concrete pillar that someone painted beige and fitted with a tactical vest. Abhishek Bachchan pops up for a guest appearance that lasts roughly as long as a commercial break, tossing off a couple of winks before vanishing into the Bosphorus mist without leaving any discernible narrative footprint behind.

The script treats international terrorism with the geopolitical nuance of a cartoon about rival skateboard gangs, offering up grand speeches about media manipulation and global conspiracy that land with the hollow thud of a wet newspaper hitting an asphalt driveway. It is the kind of mid-tier action picture that populates the midnight slots on cable channels when nobody is watching, loud and aggressively incompetent and entirely convinced of its own dark sophistication. The color grading leans heavily into a sickly green-yellow tint that makes every exterior shot look like it was captured through the bottom of a stale ginger ale bottle from 2004. You can hear the boom mic dipping into the top of the frame during a tense confrontation between Khan and Oberoi on a rooftop, lingering there for three whole seconds while they argue about freedom of the press. Nobody fixed it in post, and nobody apparently cared enough to call for another take.

Hindi movies of this specific decade were obsessed with importing foreign locations just to prove they could afford the plane tickets, dropping Mumbai stars into European squares and pretending the local extras knew how to react to a Bollywood dance number that materializes out of thin air after a rooftop shootout. Here, the action lurches from Istanbul to various soundstages with zero geographical coherence, treating ancient architecture as little more than a colorful backdrop for guys in sunglasses to fire submachine guns at nothing in particular. There's a supporting actor playing a Turkish police chief who is so obviously dubbed by a voice artist in a Mumbai studio with a cold that every time he speaks, the audio is a full half-second out of sync with his jaw movements.

Suniel Shetty's wig remains a marvel of modern synthetic hair technology, defying wind machines, high-speed motorcycle leaps, and the emotional gravity of several poorly written death scenes. It sits upon his brow like a brooding mammal that decided to curl up and sleep during the third act, entirely unbothered by the gunfire erupting all around it.