These are jumbled first impressions. I saw the movie without knowing much about it going in.

The spoiler light description of the movie is that it is a revenge story that is wrapped up with social commentary.

The commentary is not particularly original or subtle. The rich and powerful people are a bunch of manipulative, hypocritical douchebags who don’t care about the masses. The fact that the message isn’t subtle isn’t a criticism, merely an observation. Sometimes heavy commentary in a movie can become a burden the causes the logic of the plot to collapse, but in this case the message is tied directly with the main character, so that aspect pretty smoothly integrates in.

The main character, who is essentially unnamed, is played by Dev Patel who is also the director and a writer for the movie. He does great. He’s got the physicality and the facial acting to sell the character.

I really enjoyed watching Sikandar Kher, who plays a corrupt cop. He has an amazing face for a villain. His chin isn’t quite Robert Z’Dar tier, but it does some serious heavy lifting.

I was sadly let down by a lot of the action scenes. The actors themselves seemed talented, but the camera was far too spastic. While I’m sure it was trying to be immersive and capture a feeling of frantic chaos, I found myself pulled out and annoyed quite often.

Even in scenes of tension between the action the camera often felt uncomfortable lingering on any particular shot for too long. I really wanted it to hold sometimes, as the movie occasionally had some very artistic frames, but they never got any time to breathe.

I would rate this as the kind of movie that didn’t blow me away, but for a directorial debut it’s pretty strong, and if Patel makes more movies I am signed up to see them and hope he builds on experience from this one.