The sound design during that initial foot chase in Arjun Patiala has this weird, echoing click attached to every third stride that sounds suspiciously like someone dropping a wooden spoon on a kitchen tile, and if I am honest, that tiny audio glitch set the tone for the entire ninety-five minutes. Diljit Dosanjh runs through a crowded Punjab alleyway holding a confiscated bicycle over his head, his face locked in a heroic grimace that dissolves into complete confusion the second he realizes nobody is actually chasing him anymore, which is supposed to be the joke, except the joke arrives about four seconds too early because the editor couldn't resist holding on a lingering wide shot of a stray dog scratching its ear instead of cutting to the punchline on Dosanjh's eyebrows. It is a messy way to start a comedy, sure, but Rohit Jugraj directing things with an aggressive kind of nervous energy that refuses to settle down, cutting between high-angle drone shots and violently shaky handheld camera movements that make even a simple conversation over a plate of samosas feel like an impending bomb threat. Hindi cinema has spent the last decade trying to systematize irony, wrapping every punchline in five layers of meta-awareness so that the audience never has to feel stupid for laughing at something dumb, but this movie mostly just throws things against the wall and watches them slide down.

Dosanjh plays the titular cop, a man whose entire personality is built around wearing aviator sunglasses indoors and delivering motivational speeches to people who are just trying to buy onions. He has this specific way of pausing mid-sentence to adjust his holster that feels less like character work and more like an actor trying to remember if he left his car lights on, which somehow works for the material because Arjun Patiala is supposed to be an incompetent lawman operating in a fictional town where crime consists mostly of local teenagers stealing cauliflowers from municipal trucks. Kriti Sanon enters around the twenty-minute mark as an ambitious journalist wearing denim jackets that cost more than my first two cars combined, marching into the police station with a notepad and a scowl that suggests she has read every textbook on modern media empowerment ever published and hated every single page. She talks fast. She yells at male authority figures with the rehearsed cadence of a debate champion who has practiced her indignation in front of a full-length mirror. Varun Sharma tags along as Onida Singh, the sidekick whose primary function is to scream in high-pitched terror whenever a minor inconvenience occurs, echoing the kind of broad, physical comedy that worked in Fukrey but feels a bit more desperate here when the script forgets to give him actual jokes.

The screenplay by Ritesh Shah and Sandeep Leyzell seems to have been written on a whiteboard that got erased three times by someone who changed their mind about whether this was going to be a broad spoof of action tropes or a genuine romantic comedy with occasional gunfights. Characters break the fourth wall by turning directly to the camera and complaining about the plot holes, which is fine as a stylistic choice until they start complaining about things that haven't even happened yet, creating a confusing feedback loop where the movie critiques its own laziness before we even have a chance to notice it. There is a running bit involving a local gangster named Saksham who speaks exclusively in rhyming couplets that sound like they were generated by a mildly concussed poet in a suburban tea stall, and every time Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub opens his mouth to deliver another one, the soundtrack drops in a generic trap beat that feels entirely disconnected from the small-town Punjab setting. It is not that the film lacks ideas, because there are actually too many ideas crammed into scenes that should be breathing, resulting in a rhythm where a genuinely funny visual gag is immediately followed by a four-minute stretch of exposition about land acquisition that feels like it wandered in from a completely different project.

Cinematographer Jishnu Bhattacharjee shoots the proceedings with a hyper-saturated palette that makes every wall in the police station look like it was painted an hour before the cameras rolled using leftover neon poster paint from a high school prom. The colors are loud, the lighting is aggressively flat, and the camera has this habit of zooming into close-ups of characters' shoes during moments of emotional realization, a visual tic that starts off feeling mildly eccentric before turning into a noticeable distraction. Sachin-Jigar's soundtrack fares slightly better, though the romantic number that plays while Dosanjh and Sanon chase each other through a mustard field features a background vocal track that is clearly dubbed by someone whose voice is two octaves higher than the actor on screen, a small technical lapse that kept pulling me out of the narrative every single time it played. That dubbing mismatch is one of those low-stakes mechanical annoyances that tends to stick in your head long after the bigger narrative issues have faded from memory, much like the way certain background extras in the crowd scenes clearly have no idea what they are supposed to be reacting to.

Beneath the messy pacing and the occasionally frantic editing, the movie tries to poke fun at the way commercial movies handle female agency by having Sanon's character constantly point out how little narrative use she has outside of being rescued, but the satire has no teeth because the film immediately turns around and puts her in the exact same damsel-in-distress scenario it was just mocking five minutes earlier. This kind of self-canceling humor runs through the entire runtime, neutralizing any potential political or social commentary in favor of safe, middle-of-the-road silliness that won't offend anyone sitting in the back row of a multiplex eating butter popcorn. Diljit Dosanjh maintains a strange kind of goofy charm through all of this, keeping his delivery loose and improvisational even when the script forces him to explain the joke right after telling it, which is a rare skill that saves several scenes from total collapse. Other mainstream movies from the period managed to blend social satire and broad slapstick with a bit more structural discipline, but this one relies entirely on the individual charisma of its leads to bridge the massive chasms in the editing bay. When the climax arrives with a massive shootout involving fake mustaches and a sound effect that mimics a cartoon slide whistle every time someone falls over, you realize the production stopped caring about making sense somewhere around the second reel and just decided to lean fully into the chaos.

The whole thing wraps up with a bizarre musical number where the entire cast dances in front of a painted backdrop of the Taj Mahal while local police officers throw confetti at each other, and as the credits began to roll over a blooper reel featuring actors forgetting their lines, I found myself thinking less about the themes of corruption or media ethics and more about that weird wooden-spoon sound effect from the opening foot chase. It lingers. It sits there in your memory because it was so utterly misplaced in a professional mix, an artifact of a rushed post-production schedule that couldn't quite iron out the wrinkles before the release date arrived. Arjun Patiala is messy in a way that feels distinctly human rather than calculated by an algorithm, stumbling through its own jokes with a kind of awkward enthusiasm that makes it hard to stay genuinely angry at it, even when the gags fall completely flat on their faces.