Sergeant
Synopsis:
Randeep Hooda is literally limping down a dusty Delhi lane with this massive, terrifying metal brace strapped to his leg, looking completely miserable while shouting at some poor guy who's just trying to mind his own business. Sergeant is the latest gritty entry into the massive catalogue of modern bollywood movies that love trading musical numbers for brooding cops with anger issues, and honestly, this one takes itself so seriously it almost wraps back around to being funny. Let's rewind a bit though because before we get to Randeep screaming in rain-slicked alleys, we have to talk about who this guy actually is. He plays Nikhil Sharma, a cop whose career basically went down the toilet after he lost his leg in an unfortunate line-of-duty accident that left him permanently disabled and drowning in cheap booze and bitter memories. He's got this prosthetic limb that squeaks every time he walks, and I swear to god the sound guy dialed that squeak up to max volume because you hear it in every single quiet emotional scene. Anyway, Nikhil is struggling to keep his job at the local police station where his boss treats him like a total nuisance, pushing desk work his way while younger officers get to chase actual criminals through the streets. But Nikhil isn't just some washed-up drunk officer waiting for his pension, oh no, because his entire world is suddenly flipped upside down by a bizarre murder case that hits way too close to home. Stuff happens and suddenly a troubled local youth ends up dead under super mysterious circumstances, and the local politicians and big shots are rushing to sweep the whole messy thing under the rug before anybody asks uncomfortable questions. Nikhil refuses to let it go. He starts digging around, interrogating sketchy informants in shady tea stalls, and glaring at people with that classic Randeep Hooda intense squint that makes you wonder if he's trying to solve a crime or just constipated. The investigation leads him straight into a tangled web of corporate corruption and local political filth involving a powerful figure played by Arun Govil, who you probably remember as Lord Rama from the ancient television epic Ramayan, but here he's rocking a sleek white beard and expensive suits while looking extremely shady. Arun Govil's character is pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and whenever he's on screen, he's just radiating pure calculated evil while sipping tea and ruining people's lives. And then boom, Sapna Pabbi shows up as a key figure connected to the victim, bringing this chaotic energy into the frame while Adil Hussain pops in as another heavy hitter in the cast, adding some serious acting chops to a movie that desperately needs to anchor itself because the plot starts spinning completely out of control. Adil Hussain is just being his usual majestic self, playing a senior figure who knows way more than he's letting on, and honestly, watching these veteran actors navigate a script that feels like it was written on the back of a napkin during a lunch break is quite an experience. Hindi films love a good gritty conspiracy thriller, but Sergeant really leans hard into the melancholy mood lighting, casting every single scene in deep shades of blue and gray like the sun hasn't shone in Delhi for five years. We get Adil Hussain brooding over case files, and then out of nowhere, right in the middle of a super tense interrogation about drug smuggling, the movie completely halts momentum to squeeze in a random dramatic sequence that feels like it wandered in from a totally different project. The interval block hits you right when Nikhil gets ambushed behind a dilapidated warehouse by a bunch of masked thugs who beat him up with iron pipes, and he just lies there in the mud while the screen cuts to black with zero warning. It's hilarious. Like, you're sitting there eating popcorn and the screen just violently shuts off while Randeep is groaning on the pavement. Act two kicks off with Nikhil waking up in a hospital bed with a bandage wrapped around his head, completely ignoring doctor's orders, ripping his IV out, and immediately storming out of the ward in his hospital gown to continue his reckless investigation because cops in bollywood movies simply do not believe in bed rest. He tracks down Sonia Goswami's character, who drops a massive exposition bomb revealing that the entire conspiracy goes all the way up to the top municipal offices, linking the dead kid to a massive illegal land-grabbing scam. I mean, they completely rush through this massive, life-altering plot twist in one single, breathless sentence where Sonia just casually admits that the Mayor ordered the hit to protect a multi-crore real estate deal. No dramatic buildup, no detective work leading up to it, just boom, there's your culprit. Nikhil gets angrier, his leg brace squeaks louder, and he decides to go rogue, ditching his badge and gun—well, he keeps the gun obviously—and preparing for a final showdown. He drives his battered Maruti Suzuki to an abandoned industrial shipyard at midnight, where all the bad guys are hanging out in dimly lit shipping containers waiting to finish him off once and for all. A massive, chaotic brawl breaks out in the mud and rain, with Randeep Hooda taking wild swings despite his crippled leg, getting kicked across gravel, headbutting a henchman, and grunting loudly as he takes way too many punches to the ribs. Arun Govil watches from a balcony, looking mildly annoyed that this disabled ex-cop is causing so much property damage to his illegal warehouse. Nikhil finally manages to tackle the main villain through a rotten wooden railing, sending them both crashing down onto a pile of old cardboard boxes in the dirt. The cops finally show up with sirens wailing, flashing red and blue lights reflecting off the puddles, and they arrest the surviving syndicate members while Nikhil just limps away into the darkness, his squeaking metal leg fading out into the heavy night air as the credits violently flash on the screen.
Randeep Hooda has this habit of chewing on dialogue like it's a dry piece of gristle he can't quite spit out, which works wonders when he's playing a cop whose brain is basically a trash fire of old grievances and lingering regrets. In Sergeant, a streaming procedural that dropped on JioCinema without much of a promotional blitz, he plays Nikhil Sharma, a Chandigarh police officer stuck wearing an eye patch after a botched raid that left him physically compromised and professionally sidelined. If I'm honest, the whole one-eyed lawman trope has been done to death ever since Raajneeti or even way further back in Hindi cinema, but Hooda approaches the weariness with a specific kind of dead-eyed exhaustion that makes you forgive the familiar geography of the character. He walks with a heavy, flat-footed stomp that tells you everything about his knees and his temperament, leaning his entire shoulder into doorways as though the building itself might owe him money. It's a performance that doesn't ask for your sympathy so much as it demands your patience, dragging its feet through dusty police stations and damp interrogation rooms while the plot slowly unwinds its tangled ball of yarn.
Director Prawaal Raman tries to frame this as some sort of neo-noir meditation on justice and bodily decay, but the rhythm of the thing keeps getting tripped up by its own budgetary limitations and some truly baffling editing choices. There is a scene midway through where Nikhil confronts a local politician in a parking garage, and the editor cuts back and forth to a wide shot of a stray dog eating garbage near a dumpster for no discernible reason. It's a small thing but it bugged me because it breaks the tension right as Hooda and Adil Hussain are starting to generate some real friction. Hussain plays Nikhil's estranged mentor with a practiced, grandfatherly warmth that feels slippery, always wearing linen kurtas that look just a bit too expensive for a retired civil servant living in a suburban flat. The screenplay gives them plenty of space to circle each other in muted tones, though it leans too heavily on flashbacks that look like they were graded through a greasy yellow Tupperware lid. Arun Govil pops up as Nikhil's ailing father, bringing that familiar, steady presence that reminds you of Ramayan morning broadcasts on Doordarshan, though he mostly just sits on a wicker chair staring wistfully at old photographs while the ceiling fan hums a slow, irritating rhythm above his head.
The visual language of the film oscillates wildly between moody, rain-slicked alleyways that borrow heavily from the aesthetic playbook of Paatal Lok and flat, brightly lit daytime sequences that look like a corporate safety video commissioned by the Punjab tourism board. Cinematographer Sameer Arya loves a low-angle shot that cuts off the tops of the actors' heads, which gets old by about the fourth time someone is interrogating a suspect under a harsh fluorescent strip. Sapna Pabbi is largely stranded in a thankless role as a therapist or a journalist or possibly both—the script isn't entirely clear on her credentials for the first forty minutes—whose primary function is to look concerned while Nikhil pours cheap whiskey into a coffee mug. She delivers her lines with a crisp, clipped efficiency that feels imported from an entirely different genre of television, one where people actually close their laptops when they're finished typing instead of just staring blankly at glowing screens in dark rooms. Sonia Goswami gets even less to do as a witness whose testimony supposedly holds the key to the entire conspiracy, drifting in and out of scenes like a ghost who wandered onto the wrong set and decided to stay for the craft services.
What keeps the film from sinking entirely into the swamp of standard direct-to-digital content is Hooda's total commitment to playing someone who is genuinely unpleasant to be around. He doesn't do that movie-star thing where the gruff exterior hides a heart of gold and a soft spot for stray puppies; Nikhil is just bitter, isolated, and drinking too much tea with too much sugar because his liver is already throwing a tantrum. The sound design leans hard into the ambient noise of northern India—traffic horns that sound like dying geese, the rattling of ceiling fans, the dull thud of heavy boots on linoleum—creating an atmosphere that feels sweaty and claustrophobic even when characters are standing in wide-open public parks. Hindi movies have a long history of turning the police procedural into a moral sermon about the rot at the heart of the system, but this one is much more interested in the simple logistics of being tired all the time. Nobody learns a valuable lesson by the time the credits roll, and the big conspiracy involving land grabs and local elections feels less like a shocking revelation and more like the predictable cost of doing business in a mid-sized Punjabi city.
There's a recurring synth drone on the soundtrack that kicks in every single time Nikhil looks at his old badge, and it started grating on my nerves by the second episode equivalent mark. It's the kind of sonic crutch that tells the audience how to feel because the scene itself hasn't quite figured out whether it's sad, angry, or just killing time until the next commercial break. Yet despite these mechanical hiccups, there is an unglamorous grit to the way the central relationship between the disgraced cop and his former boss plays out in dingy kitchens over cold parathas. They don't shout or throw punches; they just talk around their shared failures while avoiding each other's eyes, occupying the kind of uncomfortable silence that usually only happens when two people who used to be close realize they have nothing left to steal from each other's pasts. It makes for an uneven, often frustrating viewing experience that refuses to offer the cheap catharsis of a clean wrap-up, preferring instead to fade out on a man staring blankly through a scratched window while the rain finally stops.