Film Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 Stars)

Baaghi 4 delivers a bold and gritty return to one of Bollywood’s most action-intense franchises. This chapter sees Tiger Shroff back as the tormented yet physically formidable Ronnie, embarking on a journey that fuses bone-crushing violence with psychological trauma.

Directed by A. Harsha in his Hindi debut and produced by Sajid Nadiadwala, the film also stars Sanjay Dutt as a dread-inducing nemesis, with Sonam Bajwa and Harnaaz Sandhu Kaur playing crucial roles. The narrative promises relentless mayhem, but with an emotional undercurrent of grief, guilt, and fractured reality.

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Introduction & Context

There are certain franchises in Indian cinema that live or die by the force of their central character. The Baaghi saga, since its 2016 inception, has never pretended to be an ensemble drama or a layered meditation on society. It has thrived on one elemental promise: unrestrained action wedded to raw emotion, orchestrated around Tiger Shroff’s sinewy physicality. By the time Baaghi 3 released, however, the formula had begun to show fatigue. Audiences admired the athletic spectacle but longed for a more potent narrative – one that dared to dig beneath the flexing muscle and shattering bones.

Baaghi 4 arrives in precisely this atmosphere of scepticism and curiosity. Directed by A. Harsha, marking his Hindi debut after making his mark in Kannada cinema, the film shoulders the dual burden of revitalising a faltering franchise and proving that Tiger Shroff’s cinematic identity is capable of greater depth than the gym-sculpted fighter archetype. Produced under Sajid Nadiadwala’s reliable banner, the film also ropes in Sanjay Dutt – a move that carries both nostalgic weight and dramatic potential.

The narrative premise itself is darker, murkier, and far more psychologically corrosive than any of its predecessors. Here, Ronnie is not simply fighting corrupt armies or criminal networks. He is fighting the invisible spectre of his own fractured mind. He emerges from a coma, scarred not just in body but in soul, haunted by the uncertainty of love lost and the unreliable fragments of his memory. The stage is set not merely for combat in alleys and rooftops, but for a battle against hallucinations, against grief, against a creeping disintegration of the self.

In this respect, Baaghi 4 attempts something more audacious than its franchise siblings: it presents Ronnie not only as an indestructible fighter but also as a traumatised human, consumed by guilt, doubt, and psychological claustrophobia. Whether it fully succeeds in balancing this duality becomes the central question of the viewing experience.

Story & Themes

The story of Baaghi 4 does not unspool like a conventional action film. It does not commence with the hero in triumph, nor with the kind of stylish introductory set-piece that Bollywood action vehicles so often indulge in. Instead, the opening is muted, almost disarming in its bleakness. Ronnie awakens from a coma, not to the applause of well-wishers, but to the suffocating silence of uncertainty. His body is frail, his mind fractured, and his very identity feels like a disjointed puzzle. The man who once embodied invincibility is now consumed by fragility.

From this vulnerable foundation, the narrative thrust emerges. Ronnie is plagued by visions – blurred images of a woman he loved, echoes of conversations he cannot piece together, and fragmented memories that may or may not be real. The film wisely resists clarifying whether these apparitions are manifestations of trauma, hallucinations induced by neurological damage, or deliberate manipulations by unseen forces. This ambiguity imbues the first act with a genuinely unsettling atmosphere. The audience, like Ronnie himself, becomes disoriented, unsure of what is real and what is fabrication.

The thematic bedrock of Baaghi 4 is grief. It is not the melodramatic grief of traditional Bollywood tragedy, but a more insidious form: guilt-inflected, hallucinatory, corrosive. Ronnie is not merely mourning someone he has lost; he is tormented by the gnawing suspicion that he may have failed them, that his survival itself is an act of betrayal. This sense of culpability eats away at him, and the screenplay laces even the quieter interludes with a palpable dread. When he does eventually snap into action, it is not simply rage that fuels him – it is the desperate attempt to silence the voices in his head.

Another significant theme is the instability of memory. By presenting Ronnie as an unreliable narrator of his own life, the film edges into psychological-thriller territory. Flashbacks are shown, only to be contradicted later. Apparent allies may or may not exist. The audience is made complicit in Ronnie’s confusion, which, at its best moments, creates a kind of cinematic vertigo. In a genre so often dominated by linear cause-and-effect storytelling, this structural instability feels refreshing.

Yet, Baaghi 4 is not content to remain a meditative psychological chamber piece. The second act gradually broadens the canvas, weaving Ronnie’s fractured psyche into a wider conflict involving organised crime, hidden conspiracies, and the looming threat personified by Sanjay Dutt’s antagonist. Here the narrative pivots, marrying Ronnie’s internal turmoil with external forces that exploit his vulnerabilities. The ambiguity of his visions collides with the brutality of the world outside, blurring the line between inner demons and tangible threats.

At its heart, then, the film is a parable about identity under siege. Ronnie is not only tested in alleyway brawls and warehouse battles but in the far more excruciating battlefield of his own mind. The enemy is both external and internal: fists and knives on one side, hallucinations and fractured memories on the other. This duality lends the film a thematic richness absent from earlier instalments.

Where previous entries in the franchise framed Ronnie as a near-mythical avenger, here he is rendered disturbingly human. He bleeds, falters, doubts, and questions the very ground beneath his feet. The violence, when it erupts, becomes not merely spectacle but a desperate assertion of existence. Each fight sequence doubles as a cry against dissolution, against the erasure of identity.

In essence, Baaghi 4 uses the grammar of action cinema to tell a story of grief, guilt, and psychological fracture. Whether one sees it as a bold subversion of the franchise’s formula or as an uneasy hybrid of action and psychological drama will depend on taste. But what is undeniable is that, thematically, the film aspires to be more than just a barrage of broken bones. It is, at least in conception, a tale of a man at war with the ghosts of memory and the unforgiving brutality of reality.

Character Arcs & Performances

Tiger Shroff as Ronnie

Tiger Shroff has long been accused of relying excessively on his physical prowess while neglecting the emotional undercurrents that might transform an action hero into a fully rounded protagonist. In Baaghi 4, however, he appears determined to silence his detractors. This is not the glossy, invulnerable Ronnie of earlier instalments. Instead, Shroff embraces a more fractured, tormented variation, one in which physical might is inseparable from psychological ruin.

His body remains the central instrument of the performance – lean, honed, elastic, and devastating in motion – yet here, that body is marked by vulnerability. The film opens with him emaciated, trembling, and disoriented, a man barely in control of his own faculties. Shroff plays these moments with surprising restraint. He does not lunge immediately into the balletic kicks and flips for which he is celebrated; instead, he allows stillness, silence, and hesitation to define his character’s reawakening. This subdued physicality – a man struggling to reconnect with his own strength – is far more compelling than his usual displays of brute efficiency.

When the action does arrive, it is all the more powerful for this delayed gratification. His fight sequences, staged with grim ferocity rather than flamboyance, feel not merely choreographed but instinctive – as though Ronnie is clawing his way out of both physical peril and mental collapse. The duality of performance lies in his ability to shift between vulnerability and savagery: one moment drowning in grief, the next exploding into violence. For once, Tiger Shroff’s eyes carry as much weight as his fists. His anguish feels credible, his tears unforced, and his rage rooted in something deeper than the mechanical demand of the script.

Sanjay Dutt as the Antagonist

Sanjay Dutt’s entrance is delayed, but his shadow hangs over the narrative long before he appears. When he finally does emerge, it is with a sense of inevitability – as though the void Ronnie inhabits has summoned a nemesis worthy of his torment. Dutt’s sheer physical presence, weathered yet commanding, lends his character an aura of dread. He does not need to leap, spin, or engage in gymnastic combat; his menace emanates from the weight of his gaze, the gravitas of his voice, and the implied violence in his every gesture.

Dutt does not play the villain as a caricatured monster but as a man who has himself walked through shadows. There is a weariness to his cruelty, as though his own trauma has calcified into ruthlessness. This nuance ensures that his antagonist is not merely a foil but a distorted mirror of Ronnie – another man broken by life, though in his case, broken into brutality rather than grief. The eventual confrontation between the two does not feel like a generic hero-versus-villain battle; it resembles a clash of two damaged souls, each embodying a different response to trauma.

Harnaaz Sandhu Kaur as the Romantic Anchor

In her Hindi film debut, Harnaaz Sandhu Kaur shoulders the daunting task of embodying the emotional ghost that haunts Ronnie. Her role is not defined by dramatic monologues or elaborate gestures, but by a quieter, more restrained presence. She appears in flashbacks, in half-remembered moments, and in visions that may or may not be real. Sandhu lends these appearances a warmth that makes Ronnie’s grief feel tangible.

Her chemistry with Tiger Shroff is delicate rather than overt, which works in the film’s favour. Rather than a blazing love story, theirs is a romance defined by loss – the ache of what could have been. Sandhu’s natural poise and sincerity ensure that she is not reduced to a mere narrative device. She becomes the emotional core, the embodiment of both memory and longing. Even when the script does not allow her to dominate scenes, her presence lingers, fuelling Ronnie’s torment and propelling his desperate need for clarity.

Sonam Bajwa as the Ally

Sonam Bajwa, though in a more functional role, injects the narrative with a sense of steadiness. She is positioned as an anchor in Ronnie’s chaotic world, part ally, part sceptic, and part observer of his decline. Bajwa avoids melodrama, choosing instead to convey her character’s conflict through understated gestures – a doubtful glance, a moment of hesitation, a flicker of compassion. In a film dominated by heightened emotions and visceral spectacle, her restraint feels refreshing.

Supporting Ensemble

The supporting players – friends, conspirators, henchmen, and fleeting figures from Ronnie’s hallucinations – perform adequately, though none are granted the dimensionality of the central quartet. Their purpose is largely functional: to propel the plot, to complicate Ronnie’s reality, or to serve as fodder for the relentless action choreography. Yet their presence contributes to the film’s immersive atmosphere, a labyrinth populated by faces that blur between reality and hallucination.

Overall Performances

What distinguishes Baaghi 4 from its predecessors is the seriousness with which its actors embrace the material. There is little of the wink-wink bravado or the hyper-stylised posturing that marred earlier instalments. Instead, there is a collective attempt to ground the story’s excesses in emotional reality. Shroff delivers his most complete performance to date; Dutt brings gravitas and menace; Sandhu infuses warmth and sincerity; Bajwa offers balance and composure.

Together, they elevate what could have been a derivative actioner into a film that at least aspires to psychological weight. Whether every attempt succeeds is debatable, but the commitment is undeniable.

Craft & Technical Brilliance

An action film, particularly one that attempts to fuse psychological unrest with visceral spectacle, lives and dies by its craft. Baaghi 4 is not a chamber drama that can survive on acting alone; it requires its aesthetic and technical scaffolding to sustain the atmosphere of brutality, chaos, and fractured reality. To its credit, the film marshals its technical departments with seriousness, even if the balance between stylistic flourish and narrative cohesion occasionally wavers.

Cinematography

Swamy J Gowda’s cinematography is one of the film’s most vital assets. His lens does not flatter the world Ronnie inhabits; instead, it renders it abrasive and unstable. The palette oscillates between cold greys and harsh neon, a visual juxtaposition that mirrors the protagonist’s fractured psyche. In moments of hallucination, the lighting bleeds unnaturally, shadows elongate, and the frame becomes subtly distorted, producing a disquieting effect without resorting to gimmickry. By contrast, the fight sequences are shot with clarity and precision, eschewing excessive slow motion in favour of raw immediacy.

This visual grammar achieves two aims simultaneously: it grounds the action in a tactile reality while also immersing the viewer in Ronnie’s unreliable perception. The result is an uneasy fusion of hyper-realism and subjectivity, a cinematic equivalent of standing on shifting ground.

Editing

Kiran Gowda and Nitin FCP’s editing deserves credit for maintaining coherence in a film that constantly flirts with disorientation. The opening act, heavy with ambiguity, could easily have collapsed into confusion; yet the editors manage to sustain intrigue without allowing the narrative to become incomprehensible. The transitions between memory, hallucination, and reality are handled with a deliberate fluidity, ensuring that the audience remains unsettled but not alienated.

However, the film does suffer from bloat. At nearly two and a half hours, it tests endurance, and certain sequences – particularly in the latter half – feel indulgent. Ten to fifteen minutes of judicious trimming would have sharpened the impact, allowing the climactic confrontations to hit with greater ferocity.

Action Choreography

Here lies the heart of Baaghi 4. Designed by V. Venkat, Kecha Khamphakdee, Kevin Kumar, and Stun Silva, the action sequences are unapologetically brutal. They eschew the balletic elegance of Hollywood martial arts choreography in favour of bone-crunching realism. Fights are not clean; they are dirty, messy, and grotesquely physical. Bones snap audibly, blood splatters, and bodies are hurled with feral intensity.

What elevates the action is not merely its gore but its psychological tethering to Ronnie’s state of mind. Each punch, kick, and grapple feels like an extension of his desperation – as if violence is his only means of asserting reality against the phantoms that plague him. The choreography ensures that no fight feels gratuitous; every skirmish has narrative weight, whether it is a hallucinated encounter in a corridor or a climactic duel against Dutt’s antagonist.

Production Design

Tanvi Leena Patil’s production design constructs a world that feels simultaneously lived-in and nightmarish. Ronnie’s surroundings are never neutral; they reflect his mental disarray. Hospitals feel sterile to the point of menace, safehouses exude claustrophobia, and nightclubs pulsate with a sinister energy. The set pieces are designed not merely as backdrops but as psychological extensions of Ronnie’s turmoil.

Particularly striking is the climactic setting: a labyrinthine industrial space where shadows and machinery conspire to trap the protagonist in a literal and figurative maze. It is an environment that swallows him, a physical manifestation of the entrapment he experiences in his mind.

Costume and Styling

The costume department – helmed by Aki Narula, Rushi Sharma, Manoshi Nath, and their collaborators – strikes a deliberate balance between grit and glamour. Ronnie is dressed in muted tones, his attire progressively darkening as his descent deepens, until he resembles a man half-consumed by shadow. By contrast, the female characters are styled with an overt glamour that occasionally jars against the film’s darker aesthetic, yet these choices serve the commercial impulse of Bollywood spectacle.

Sanjay Dutt’s styling deserves special mention: his wardrobe communicates menace without theatricality, relying on leather, muted hues, and a weathered ruggedness that mirrors his character’s brutal pragmatism.

Sound Design and Score

If the cinematography captures Ronnie’s fractured vision, the sound design externalises his internal chaos. Ankit-Sachet and Shrey’s background score surges with relentless intensity, often teetering on the edge of overwhelming the film. At its best, it amplifies tension with pounding percussion and haunting motifs; at its worst, it drowns quieter moments in bombast.

The diegetic soundscape, however, is effective. The crunch of bone, the reverberation of fists against flesh, and the echoing emptiness of cavernous spaces all contribute to a visceral immersion. It is not subtle, but subtlety is not the film’s ambition.

Directorial Choices

For A. Harsha, making his Hindi debut, Baaghi 4 is both a statement of intent and a gamble. His direction is at its boldest in the opening act, where ambiguity reigns, and psychological tension dominates. In these stretches, he demonstrates genuine cinematic ambition, using framing, pacing, and dissonant imagery to evoke Ronnie’s fractured consciousness.

However, as the film progresses, Harsha seems torn between sustaining this psychological intensity and catering to the expectations of a mainstream action franchise. Thus, the second half indulges in familiar tropes: glamour-infused songs, overblown melodrama, and lengthy spectacle-driven sequences. While these satisfy commercial appetites, they dilute the sharper edges of the film’s initial premise.

Still, Harsha deserves credit for attempting to hybridise two cinematic registers: the gritty psychological thriller and the mass-market action entertainer. The experiment is uneven, but in its boldness lies the film’s most compelling quality.

Music & Soundscape

Bollywood action franchises often hinge on their soundtrack to punctuate brutality with relief, to provide glamour where grit threatens to suffocate. Baaghi 4 is no exception, though it attempts to align its musical palette with the film’s darker psychological undertones. The results are mixed – at times arresting, at times formulaic.

The standout is undoubtedly “Marjaana”, a haunting ballad that threads melancholy into the film’s architecture. Its placement is strategic, surfacing during moments of Ronnie’s most acute vulnerability, reinforcing the theme of grief without tipping into saccharine melodrama. The composition is layered, its minor-key arrangements echoing the protagonist’s descent into memory and despair.

“Get Ready to Fight – Khauf Hai” resurrects the franchise’s anthem-like energy, yet this iteration feels sharper, angrier, more feral. It mirrors.

Comparisons & Place in Bollywood Action Cinema

To situate Baaghi 4 within the wider landscape of Indian action cinema is to acknowledge its hybrid identity. It is neither a pure psychological thriller nor a traditional Bollywood entertainer; it is a volatile concoction, alternating between the two registers with varying degrees of success.

Compared to its predecessors, Baaghi 4 is markedly darker. Baaghi (2016) thrived on the freshness of Tiger Shroff’s physicality and the novelty of its martial arts choreography; Baaghi 2 offered grander scale and melodrama; Baaghi 3 overindulged in spectacle, collapsing under the weight of implausibility. This fourth chapter is, by contrast, introspective. It treats Ronnie not as an indestructible superhero but as a man ravaged by trauma, a choice that aligns it more with brooding neo-noir traditions than the glossy exuberance of mainstream masala.

In the broader ecosystem of Bollywood action cinema, Baaghi 4 sits uneasily but intriguingly. It borrows the physical ferocity of South Indian stunt choreography, echoes the psychological murk of international thrillers, and yet remains tethered to Bollywood conventions of music, glamour, and melodrama. It does not possess the narrative discipline of a Korean action-thriller, nor the balletic precision of a Hollywood blockbuster, but it compensates with raw, visceral intensity.

If nothing else, the film signals a willingness to push boundaries – to test how far a mainstream Hindi action franchise can venture into darker, more psychologically fragmented terrain. It may not be a flawless leap, but it is undeniably a daring one.

Verdict & Cultural Impact

Baaghi 4 is, above all, a film of contradictions. It yearns to be both a brutal psychological descent and a mass-market action carnival. At times this tension produces exhilarating results; at other times, it leaves the film feeling uneven, pulled in two irreconcilable directions. Yet within this turbulence lies its potency.

Tiger Shroff delivers his most mature performance to date, balancing feral physicality with credible fragility. Sanjay Dutt’s gravitas imbues the antagonist with menace that lingers long after the credits roll. Harnaaz Sandhu provides a tender, haunting counterweight, while Sonam Bajwa supplies composure amidst the chaos. Technically, the film is polished, its cinematography, choreography, and production design crafting a world at once visceral and disorienting.

Culturally, the film signals a shift. It dares to present an Indian action hero not as a flawless saviour but as a fractured soul grappling with guilt, hallucination, and memory. For younger audiences raised on hyper-stylised imports from Hollywood and South Korea, this blend of raw action and psychological drama will feel both familiar and novel. For traditional Bollywood viewers, however, the relentless gore and fractured narrative may prove alienating.

Ultimately, Baaghi 4 ensures that the franchise remains relevant – not by recycling old triumphs, but by embracing risk, brutality, and emotional disarray.