Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar is an odd film. The Amazon Prime Video film, starring Anil Kapoor, wants to be mass in the streets and class in the sheets. The result is a curious, uneven ride. You can see the vision behind Suresh’s film: to subvert, toy with, and use the packaging and trappings of masala action cinema to examine something more raw and primal. But the result risks being neither here nor there, an action drama that struggles to thrill nor mount a moody character study.Subedaar Arjun Maurya (a fierce Anil Kapoor) is a retired army officer who’s recently returned home to an unnamed North Indian town. Arjun is the gruff rebel desperately in search of a cause. The recent passing of his wife (Khushbu Sundar) forces Arjun into retirement after 25 years in the Army. It also forces him to find his footing with Shyama, the daughter he was barely around for (a solid Radhika Madan).Struggling to readjust to the rhythms of domestic life while reeling from grief, aside from his inner demons, Arjun must face two external ones. The first is all around him. The officer who’s seen a lifetime of battlefields and borders faces his latest foe—bureaucracy. A life of order, structure, and clearly defined power structures is flung into the chaos of corruption, inefficiency, and apathy in everyday India.I liked the textures that Suresh and his DOP, Ayan Saxena, bring to the sights and sounds of the daily grind in the initial stretch of the film. You can see Arjun’s ticking-time-bomb presence barely keeping it together amidst the indifferent bank tellers, overwhelming traffic, and persistent disorder around every corner. He’s even laughed at by police officers for stopping at traffic lights.‘Nukkad Naatak’ Review: An Energetic Indie Film About Finding Real ChangeThe second is the local sand mafia—a family of gangsters who own the town, do as they please, and kill first and ask questions later. There’s Prince (an impressive Aditya Rawal)—the violent, loose-cannon archetype. There’s the playfully named Softy Bhaiya (Panchayat’s excellent Faisal Malik). And pulling the strings behind bars is the head of the family, Babli Didi (Mona Singh, who continues to be everywhere). Under their rule, the bodies of innocents keep piling up,with no justice in sight.Faisal Malik in a still from SubedaarA Familiar TemplateIt’s a familiar template that never goes out of style. A dangerous man with a specific set of skills comes up against a criminal organisation that learns the hard way that they messed with the wrong guy. Think John Wick, Taken, The Equalizer, The Baashha formula, every Lokesh Kanagaraj film, and so on. But one of Subedaar’s flimsiest beats is how Arjun first encounters the bad guys.Arjun has only been back in town for a few months. His ex-army buddy Prabhakar (Saurabh Shukla) runs a security company and recruits Arjun to be a bodyguard for Prince and his goons. It’s an odd decision that adds little to the narrative. Instead, the far more compelling collision between the two comes shortly after, when Arjun parks his car in Prince’s favourite spot on a busy street. The entitled, trigger-happy man-child demands Arjun move his car. When he refuses, the first fight ensues.But Suresh and his co-writer Prajwal Chandrasekhar aren’t going for a basic action narrative. If anything, the film has maybe 2.5 action sequences in total. The essence of their film is finding the cinema in the build-up, not the payoff. The majority of the narrative isn’t about the actual trading of blows or breaking of bones, but the slow-burn build-up to it, with Arjun and Prince constantly circling each other, baiting each other, and preparing for the kill.Subedaar attempts to live in the simmering tension before the pressure cooker goes off—the countdown to the bomb more than the explosion itself; foreplay more than the act. It’s ambitious, but it doesn’t quite pay off, especially under the weight of the lengthy two-hour-plus runtime.Anil Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla in a still from SubedaarA Fierce Anil KapoorThe bold swing that the film takes—and that it does land, however—is that Arjun isn’t forced back into conflict; he craves it. He isn’t flung back into the life he left behind; he’s actively looking for a reason to return to the bloodshed. Subedaar is, then, more Nobody than John Wick.Arjun doesn’t know how to adapt to this new life imposed on him—of domesticity and fatherhood without the anchor of his wife. He knows combat and seeks an outlet. So, when the opportunity comes knocking by way of Prince and his thugs, he rises to the occasion. Arjun’s rage in search of a target is best realised in a sequence where he mistakes a friend of his daughter for someone trying to harass her, beating him to a pulp as a result.Though I’m still not quite sure what to make of the Radhika Madan character. Hers is a solid arc—that of a victim of harassment who refuses to be reduced to a damsel. One who is determined to be her own saviour—in this case, fighting her own battles against a group of predatory men in her college. But you can’t help but wonder if it belongs to a different film altogether.The film has a stakes problem. It can’t seem to decide if Arjun is a supersoldier action hero or an irrationally angry man who refuses to back down. His two fight sequences in the film see him pummel a small army of bad guys and thugs. And yet, in the repetitive, tiring final face-off against Prince, he struggles to hold his own. In Prince and Arjun constantly circling each other, the narrative risks going in circles. Tonally too, Subedaar is uneven and throws too much at the wall. Suresh Triveni and team want to play with, subvert, retreat, lean in, and try it all, resulting in a bumpy ride. The simmering internal character study is tossed aside in the final leg, opting for the kind of “big screen” moment the film could have done with more of.Anil Kapoor in a still from SubedaarStill, Anil Kapoor is a treat to watch in this mould. That powerful glare could cut through glass. But I’d argue his weaponised rage deserved a narrative that was more willing to exploit it and let him have fun with it, rather than take it so seriously. Aditya Rawal has fun with the Munna Bhaiya archetype, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with him after a point (aside from him wanting to repeatedly piss on people, which seems to be his MO), diminishing his own threatening presence. What we’re left with is an action drama that's all dressed up with nowhere to go. Subedaar Arjun Maurya is a character who deserves a stronger film.The film releases on Amazon Prime on March 6. (Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)Historic BAFTA Win: 'Boong' Balances Innocence and Harsh Realities of Manipur