The first fifteen minutes of Blind Game are ominous. And I’m not talking about the story. The film-making is so dated that it made me feel like a child again. The dubbing is very 1980s: the foley effects are almost a character. You can hear the studio-produced footsteps and the synthetic breathing of a man being chased in the jungle. A gunshot sounds like a human mouth imitating the whizz of a bullet (“dishkiyaoon!”). A cop taking on a bunch of crooks on a Manali road lands punches with a distinct “dishoom!”. The fundamental nature of the craft is reduced to a punchline. If it weren’t unintentional, it’d be nostalgic.
Narratively speaking, Blind Game is what happens when Abbas-Mustan’s Khiladi walks into a bar and gets arrested for underage drinking: a group of buddies get into trouble and come up with a dumb idea. A suspended Crime Branch officer who smokes like a poet and sips on posh whisky in a hill-station cabin, Sikandar (Arjun Rampal), collides into two of the panicked friends on a bike. He seems to have gatecrashed the ongoing story of these young men, Shaan and Vicky; they’re in a crisis and he can tell.
He offers to help them, only for one to turn up dead the next morning. A local inspector, Yamini (Priyamani), joins forces with Sikandar to crack this strange case that features a gang of five happy-go-lucky friends; the beginning of their friendship montage shows the heaviest of them failing to kill himself because of a faulty fan, a suicide attempt played for laughs. Sikandar and Yamini chat in sultry proverbs, there’s a cafe called Famous Five, a mysterious bag of cash, part-time gangsters, a badly-conceived conspiracy, and a mythical Asian don named David Walter Williams whose money is missing.
Sikandar is determined to get to the bottom of this case because the victim’s mates are behaving suspiciously. The town becomes a reluctant protagonist: corrupt medical officers, an orphanage, a blood-testing lab, a morgue operator, a cartoon villain with a scar who looks like he stumbled in from a cross-border terrorist tale. The meandering journey of such crime dramas — where the climax will obviously show someone explaining their masterplan in grave detail — is supposed to be the point. But the plotting is so amateur that all I wanted was to skip to the end for the ‘twist’ and the final reveal (which isn’t hard to guess if you have more than two brain cells). Thanks to streaming, all it takes is the click of a button now. But I’m nothing if not ethical, so I did some mental chores instead; I organised the rest of my day in my head while plodding through the screener. I chuckled at some of the mediocrity: like Sikandar referring to the boy nicknamed Burger as Bugger, or a backstory that chokes on the fumes of its own friends-forever tagline.
It goes without saying that the film struggles at a technical level. No accident is shown; the editing tries to conceal every set-piece and the screen clumsily cuts to black. The music is forgettable. The camerawork prays for natural light to bless most frames. The casting of the blink-and-miss extras belongs to a Bollywood spoof. And the primary performances are held hostage by the wooden writing. I’ve grown to admire Arjun Rampal, his screen presence and his improvement arc over the years; I enjoy that he enjoys his own pulpy drawl and diction. But his Sikandar is a throwback to those awkward early-2000s phases; it functions more as a “before” to the “after” we see these days. Most of the time, Sikandar looks like he’s seducing the air.
Of the younger actors, Akash Makhija (who broke out in Raakh) registers his omnipresence in 2026 with the paranoid Shaan; I’m not sure what it says that the journalist is the only one who is oblivious to the gang's scheming. Nakul Sahdev (still known as Salman from Gully Boy) hams it up as the wild card in the pack; Shayank Shukla hams it up as the joker in the pack. None of this works as a buddy drama gone wrong, and it works even less as a corny investigative thriller. It’s a miracle that I’ve stretched my review this far. But when the title montage is scored to a rap song that goes “It’s a bloody mindgame, it’s a blind game,” it should have been clear that the only way forward is backward. The writing was always on the wall. The film will make sure you hear the scribbling. Along with a few misdubbed gasps.