Neon Highway

Neon Highway opens at full throttle and rarely lifts its foot off the accelerator. Within the first ten minutes you've met your getaway driver, watched a heist go sideways, and torn through three districts of a rain-soaked, sodium-lit city that the film treats as its real lead character.

Reema Kagti directs the set-pieces with genuine confidence — there's a single-take alley sprint here that deserves to be studied — and Vijay Varma is magnetic as a man who keeps insisting he's done with the life. The problem is everything between the chases.

The screenplay gestures at a betrayal plot it never bothers to dramatise, and a third-act 'twist' that anyone awake will see coming from the opening reel. When the engines are running, Neon Highway is one of the most purely enjoyable Hindi action films in years. When they idle, it stalls.

Watch it big, watch it loud, and don't think too hard about who double-crossed whom. As pure sensation it delivers; as a story it's running on fumes.