Baaghi 4 (2025): A. Harsha’s Action Thriller - Review

The last time Baaghi 4 roared into theatres, it did so with a fractured narrative, a confused - and confusing - dual role for a beauty pageant winner, and a plot that seemed to have been assembled from discarded bits of a Tollywood revenge saga. It’s been nearly a year since that September 2025 release, and the film's 3.9/10 rating on TMDb feels almost generous to a section of the audience that walked out scratching their heads. But here’s the thing about a franchise like Baaghi: it doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be loud. And A. Harsha’s fourth instalment is certainly that, even if it’s also a 156-minute monument to everything that’s gone wrong with Tiger Shroff’s stardom.

The premise, on paper, had promise. Ronny (Shroff) wakes up from a coma, his memory a shredded mess, and his girlfriend Alisha (Harnaaz Kaur Sandhu) is nowhere to be found. What follows is not a tender investigation into grief but a relentless, muscle-bound descent into a labyrinth of lookalikes, crime lords, and plot twists that feel less like reveals and more like a screenwriter’s fever dream. Ronny is a man haunted by trauma, but the screenplay is too busy setting up the next fight scene to sit with him in it. Instead of a mourning boyfriend, we get a brooding machine who punches his way through Goa’s underbelly, pausing only to deliver dialogue that sounds like it was translated three times over and still lost meaning in the process.

The core problem is Harsh’s direction, which treats romance and thriller solely as transitional bridges between action sequences. The action itself is technically proficient - Shroff’s physicality remains his one undeniable superpower. But there’s a sameness to the hyper-kinetic choreography, a numbing inevitability to the slow-motion kicks and gravity-defying flips. When the story finally arrives at its central twist - that Alisha is actually Avantika, and that she has a sister (also played by Sandhu) - the film has already exhausted our patience. Sandhu, for her part, tries her best to create a sharp distinction between the wounded heroine and her more fiery counterpart, but the writing gives her no room to breathe. She spends most of the film reacting to Shroff’s quips or looking terrified during his explosions of rage.

Sanjay Dutt, as the villainous Chacko, at least seems to be having fun. That’s more than can be said for the rest of the cast, who are mostly relegated to exposition duty. Sonam Bajwa’s Olivia is introduced with fanfare, then promptly sidelined in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere before she’s unceremoniously dropped. Shreyas Talpade’s Jeetu is given the unenviable task of being comic relief, but his jokes land with a thud that echoes through the empty theatre. And Saurabh Sachdeva, typically a reliable character actor, is wasted as Paulo, a stooge who exists solely to take a beating.

It’s hard to know who this film is for. Fans of the Baaghi series expect a certain level of genre-bending excess, and Harsha delivers that in spades - there’s a chase sequence through a carnival that is genuinely inventive, and a final confrontation on a ship that manages to tick every Bollywood blockbuster box. But for the casual viewer, or anyone hoping for a coherent story, Baaghi 4 is a slog. The romance is inert, the thriller elements are predictable, and the grief angle is handled with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Still, there is a strange, almost hypnotic quality to its failures. You watch Shroff try to emote with a furrowed brow for the hundredth time, and you wonder if the franchise has anywhere left to go. The ending is, of course, purposefully ambiguous - a tease for a fifth film that, based on this reception, may never see the light of day. Perhaps that’s the kindest outcome. There’s an argument to be made that a franchise this out of touch with narrative logic deserves to die a quiet death, remembering only the good days of the second film, where the action had stakes and the romance felt earned.

Yet Baaghi 4 isn’t entirely without a perverse charm. It’s a time capsule of a kind of filmmaking that refuses to evolve, a defiantly loud spectacle in an era where audiences are increasingly demanding smarter blockbusters. The film’s box office was respectable - it did not bomb, nor did it set the world on fire - but the critical mauling was universal. The script, reportedly finished just weeks before principal photography began, shows its patchwork nature in every scene transition. Characters appear, act, and vanish without logical consequence. The twist involving Alisha and Avantika feels less like a reveal and more like a convenient way to give Sandhu a double role without actually writing a compelling reason for it.

If you’re watching Baaghi 4 on a streaming platform now, half a year later, you’re probably doing so for the same reason you’d watch a demolition derby: the anticipation of crashes. Shroff’s dedication to his craft is admirable, and his rigour is the only thing keeping this bloated enterprise afloat. But you go in knowing you’ll be entertained by the spectacle, not the story. When Ronny finally learns the truth about his girlfriend, the film wants you to feel a cathartic release. Instead, you might just feel relief that after 156 minutes, the last punch has been thrown. It’s loud, it’s messy, and it says absolutely nothing about love, loss, or redemption. It is, quite simply, a Baaghi film - and that, for better or worse, is exactly what it is.