Farhan Akhtar's jaw in the opening minutes of Toofaan looks like it was carved from an old piece of teak wood that someone left out in the rain, which is a specific kind of physical transformation that Bollywood movies have been trying to pull off ever since Dharmendra started getting serious about his protein intake. Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra wants us to buy this guy as a small-time goon from the Dongri underbelly named Aziz Ali, though the moment he opens his mouth to shake down a local shopkeeper for protection money, you can still hear the polished, south Bombay upper-crust elocution trying desperately to disguise itself behind a pair of fake sideburns and a scowl. It's not great, not bad, just there, hanging over the first forty minutes like a fog that refuses to lift no matter how hard the background score insists we ought to be terrified of the local mafia. The screenplay, cobbled together by Anjum Rajabali and Vijay Maurya along with Akhtar himself, leans hard on every sports-drama cliché you could possibly dredge up from the cinematic graveyard of underdog redemption tales, taking us from the shady street-corner protection rackets all the way to the national boxing arena with the wearying predictability of a commuter train on a rusted track.

We have seen this exact narrative trajectory before, usually executed with considerably more grime in something like Anurag Kashyap's early output or even in older Hindi films where the protagonist had to sweat through his undershirt just to make the audience believe he was actually hungry. Here, the sweat looks suspiciously like glycerin applied by a makeup assistant who was probably checking her phone between rounds. The romance that arrives to soften the rough edges of Aziz's personality features Mrunal Thakur as Dr. Ananya Prabhu, a remarkably patient physician who apparently has nothing better to do with her evenings than listen to a thug talk about his hooks and jabs while eating samosas on a bench. Thakur plays this saintly social worker with an earnestness that nearly saves the romantic track from drowning in its own saccharine runoff, though the script gives her so damn little to do aside from smiling understandingly and occasionally looking worried by a hospital monitor that you start feeling bad for her agent. They fall in love with the kind of breakneck speed that only exists in screenplays written by committee, skipping past the awkward silences and minor irritations that usually make up a real relationship in favor of sun-drenched montage sequences where they ride motorbikes and laugh at nothing in particular.

The boxing sequences, when they finally arrive after what feels like three separate lifetimes of domestic bliss and sudden tragedy, are shot by cinematographer Jay O. Sengupta with a restless, dizzying energy that sometimes works and sometimes just makes you reach for the ibuprofen. There's a particular recurring sound effect every time a glove connects with a cheekbone—a wet, echoing thud that sounds less like a human fist hitting flesh and more like someone dropping a large bag of wet cement onto a linoleum floor, and after the fourth or fifth time you hear it in the span of a single round, it starts grating on your nerves in a way that no sound designer intended. Akhtar's physical conditioning for these scenes is genuinely impressive, no doubt about it, because the man is pushing fifty and still moves around the canvas with a lightness that puts actors half his age to shame, but the editing by Meghna Manchanda Sen cuts away from his face so frequently during the heavy exchanges that you're constantly aware of stunt doubles doing the heavy lifting while the star poses for the slow-motion cameras.

Paresh Rawal shows up as Nana Prabhu, the grumpy, Islamophobic boxing coach who reluctantly takes Aziz under his wing after realizing the kid has raw talent that can be hammered into gold, and Rawal plays this curmudgeon with the sleepy, half-awake competence of a veteran actor who knows he is cashing a very large check for three weeks of work. He doesn't stretch himself here, leaning entirely on his standard repertoire of disgruntled sighs and gruff paternal reprimands, but his mere presence gives the training montages a slight pulse that would have been entirely absent if they had cast a younger, less seasoned performer in the role. The dynamic between the Hindu coach and the Muslim boxer is supposed to carry the weight of modern social commentary, touching on communal harmony and the poison of prejudice, but the filmmakers handle these heavy themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer swung by a drunk bricklayer, spelling out the moral of the story in neon letters just in case the audience got distracted by their popcorn.

Vijay Raaz pops in briefly as another trainer, and it's a small thing but it bugged me how his entire character exists solely to deliver two lines of gravelly exposition before vanishing into the locker room shadows for forty minutes at a stretch. The soundtrack, composed by a rotating cast of musicians including Kernkraft 400 and D'Evil among others, hits every emotional beat with the same repetitive bass drop, recycling the title track during every single training montage until you could probably hum the horn section in your sleep. It's a loud, crowded movie that refuses to let a single moment breathe without a swelling orchestral swell or a rap verse reminding us that the protagonist is, in fact, fighting against the odds. By the time Aziz takes his final walk toward the championship ring after surviving a series of melodramatic tragedies that would have broken a less resilient man, the emotional well has already run entirely dry through sheer over-pumping.

Mehra directs with an erratic rhythm that alternates between frenetic, handheld chaos and dead-eyed melodrama, never quite settling on a consistent tone that might anchor the sprawling narrative to something resembling human truth. The supporting cast members who populate the gym and the neighborhood are clearly dubbed in post-production with a noticeable lack of acoustic matching, their dialogue floating slightly above their heads like subtitles you can hear, which pulls you right out of the illusion every single time they try to deliver a pep talk. It is a film that wants so desperately to be an anthem for the downtrodden, yet it remains trapped inside the very formulas it pretends to subvert, offering up a clean, corporate version of grit that has been scrubbed of anything genuinely dangerous or uncomfortable. Aziz Ali's journey from the streets to the stadium ends up feeling less like a true storm and more like a mild afternoon drizzle that makes the pavement slightly damp before the sun comes right back out and dries everything up without leaving a trace.