That desert sun looks brutal, and not in the way filmmakers usually fake with a yellow filter. Anurag Basu starts Kites out in the middle of nowhere with a man dying of thirst who can barely drag himself across the alkali flats, and if I'm honest, the whole thing kicks off with an intensity that the rest of the picture spends the next two hours trying to live down.

Hrithik Roshan plays Jay, a man who teaches salsa by day and runs shotgun for various underworld extraction schemes in Las Vegas by night, which sounds like the sort of high-concept nonsense Rakesh Roshan scribbled on a napkin after watching too many American action imports. Yet somehow the early scenes work because the movement is so frantic. Basu directs with a hyperactive, jagged kind of energy that borrows heavily from Tony Scott's kinetic visual grammar without quite mastering the geography of a foot chase, meaning you often have no idea who is shooting at whom or where the nearest exit is, but you feel the panic anyway. There is a relentless clipping in the editing bay where scenes are chopped down to their absolute barest sinews, skipping the establishing shots entirely to throw you straight into a fistfight or a hospital corridor. It is messy, sure, but it avoids the glazed-over perfection of most modern Hindi films that look like they were lit by committees.

Then Barbara Mori shows up as Natasha, and the movie pivots hard into a bilingual romance where neither character speaks the other's language with any fluency, forcing them to communicate through broad gestures, nervous smiles, and an awful lot of smoldering looks across crowded casino floors. Mori has an open, weathered kind of screen presence that grounds some of the more preposterous plot machinations involving cartel kingpins, corrupt cops, and hastily arranged weddings of convenience. When she and Roshan share a quiet moment in a dilapidated motel room, you forget that the plot requires them to be fleeing for their lives from half of Nevada. They just look tired. It is a small thing, but it bugged me that every time a supporting character speaks English, the audio sync is just a hair off, creating that weirdly hollow echo chamber sound familiar from bargain-bin imports.

Let's talk about Kangana Ranaut for a second because her performance as the aggressively wealthy, hopelessly devoted fiancée Gina is a masterclass in playing the unbearable second wheel. She gets the most thankless dialogue in the script—lines that basically amount to whining about country clubs while the hero is having an existential crisis—and she delivers them with such brittle, manic desperation that you almost feel sorry for her before she pulls a gun. She doesn't play Gina as a villain so much as a product of a very specific, air-conditioned kind of American wealth that makes her immune to normal human empathy. Her brother, played by Luce Rains with the permanent scowl of a man who just bit into a lemon, pursues the runaway lovers through the desert with a grim, humorless efficiency that belongs in a much cheaper B-movie.

Rajesh Roshan's soundtrack hits you over the head with the main theme song about twenty-two times too many, and while the melody is catchy enough when played on a solo acoustic guitar during the romantic montages, hearing it blasted through brass sections during a car crash gets old real fast. The cinematography by Steven Bernhard deserves some credit for finding actual texture in the neon grease of the Vegas strip and the blinding white nothingness of New Mexico, though the color grading fluctuates wildly from scene to scene, shifting from a warm sun-drenched amber to a sickly green tint without any apparent narrative reason. It looks expensive one minute and like a direct-to-video thriller the next, echoing the weirdly split personality of a production that was trying to court international audiences while still servicing the traditional domestic market.

There is an underlying tragedy about immigrants and border crossings trying to claw their way into the American dream that gets buried under all the gunfights and slow-motion hair flips. When Jay explains that he does whatever it takes just to stay afloat in a city designed to fleece tourists, Roshan drops the usual matinee idol swagger and lets you see a guy who is genuinely terrified of going back to where he started. But the script keeps pulling away from those social undercurrents to stage another motorcycle jump or another lingering close-up of Barbara Mori crying in a rainstorm. It wants to be an epic, star-crossed tragedy in the vein of Romeo and Juliet, but it keeps tripping over its own shoelaces whenever someone has to draw a weapon.

Kabir Bedi shows up as the menacing cartel boss who also happens to be Gina's father, barking orders in accented English while staring into the middle distance as if he's reading his lines off a teleprompter stuck to the ceiling. It is a completely phoned-in piece of casting that drains the third act of any real tension, turning the villain into a generic obstacle rather than a living threat. You watch him pace around his sprawling mansion and you just wish the movie would go back to the motel rooms and the cheap diners where the two leads actually seemed to give a damn about each other.

Hindi cinema has occasionally tried to cross over into Western territory with varying degrees of embarrassment, and while Kites is certainly more ambitious than most, it suffers from the same identity crisis that crippled movies like Blue. It neither fully commits to the gritty realism of an American indie nor embraces the unbridled melodrama of classic Bollywood, sitting instead in this strange, weightless middle ground where nobody seems entirely sure what kind of story they are telling.

By the time the action shifts back to that dry, sun-baked landscape for the protracted conclusion, the emotional stakes have been stretched so thin that the tragic ending feels less like a gut punch and more like a relief. The final sequence on the edge of the cliff plays out with such operatic solemnity that you almost want to laugh, not because the actors aren't trying, but because the movie has already exhausted every single trick in its bag to make you care about people who were doomed from page one. It is a messy, flawed, overstuffed piece of commercial filmmaking that collapses under the weight of its own global ambitions, yet it lingers in the back of your mind long after cleaner, more competent pictures have faded entirely from view.