Where The Writing
Failed, The Music
Peaked.

Where the dialogue sucked, the music peaked.

Alpha marks the first female-led entry in YRF's Spy Universe, with Alia Bhatt as lead agent, presenting the idea of a lab-grown Indian soldier which is more of a sophism of 90s America's RoboCop. The launch of a leading lady in a spy movie clearly felt like Shraddha or Janhvi in the Maddock horror-comedy universe, where the pieces fit comedically well — whereas the patriotic bone in a serious premise was missing big time.

The biggest flaw in this high-budget YRF movie is the dialogue. I mean, come on, get a decent writer. The Alpha serum was supposed to be a critical project and not one medical term is used. It's a serum that enhances strength and boosts organs — ashwagandha and turmeric with moringa can do all that. The scientist who created it, the scientist who worked on it, the members who dedicated years to it, and not one of them could come up with a single component of this serum. The researchers dropped the ball on this.

As I watched the movie I realised that a casual conversation between people caught on CCTV footage has more references to dopamine, cortisol and hormones — punchlines from people walking on the streets, drivers, the golgappe and momo wale bhaiya. People talking in our households have better content than "Ye sadhoo nahi hai, faadoo hai", Alia calling Hrithik Roshan out in the first ten seconds.

Calling Fateh "Baba" didn't appear as substantial as when Sita called uncle Varghese before Varghese exposed Fateh. What's the deal with one human and a growing-up girl in that entire building with zero occupants? And the failed attempt to exude heart-touching moments watching a perfectly calm girl in a tattered cage was wasteful minutes of screen time.

A twelve-year-old lab-grown kid who survived the Alpha serum, good at coding and analytical skills, asks what the Greek letter Alpha is. Seriously — my Roblox-playing six-year-old boys know Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

Alia Bhatt

Alia's performance was eluding the whole Alpha — a serum-consumed soldier who was trained to kill — in its entirety. Maybe I got spoiled by her performance in Raazi, but this performance failed. She fought well, with slight buts. The fight scenes were very well choreographed, but the need for Alia's character to maintain the stance was irregular. I noticed sometimes she'd purposely stand askew after her adversary is down and sometimes she wouldn't.

Maybe the reason for her same-face reaction across all scenes is that her acting so far across all the movies has been heavy on facial emotions, and this role required some transition from the hurt kid to teenager to grown woman, while unfortunately she couldn't balance at all. She was trying so hard to appear RoboCop with crude dialogue that it got annoying after a while.

Anil Kapoor

Anil Kapoor's performance wasn't so jhakaas this time. Talking about his character, it felt like a father losing a daughter was compensated by another one in arms. So basically when he found out Sita was alive, the lack of fatherly emotions was profound. It almost felt like "oh, good job escaping, where I would have had to raise two girls without the mom." Seeing how Sita managed to execute these high-profile members, and then her ability to track his safe house, and her demeanour — I expected a sense of pride in him as well, being the RAW chief and all.

As RAW chief he seemed like a man of few words, or just laid back, compared to his performances across the YRF Spy Verse. As a husband, the only time there was a glint of acting calibre was when he stole the serum to save his wife — the urgency he showed without thought of his career, a reckless husband is the caring one. Leaving Durga with her maasi, I thought at least here he'd be holding the baby and crying. Carrying a dead baby — whoop, expected AK to seem more distraught given his performances in the past.

Bobby Deol

Bobby Deol stuck to his Jaat roots even after he announced his true identity. He maintained his Bad Guy face from beginning to end, and although he came across as loathsome, afraid, planning, betrayed, he maintained the walk and expressions of one bad guy. Not even a sliver of change from in-power to afraid. I think he would have played a better agent than Fateh.

There was a tell-tale sign that he wasn't a patriot by the way he pursued Alpha, or even Odyssey — and that tell-tale sign was his unfazed response to every scene and character.

Sharvari

Sharvari played a good blend of trained-by-RAW-chief dad with a life abroad. The overcompensating was slightly annoying, but the dance and body language did justice to her younger-sister being, who was told her older sister protected her by being born first — which was a good desi manipulative parental thing. (Yeah, biggest eye-roll there: the positions of twins aren't decided by foetuses.) Her agility across the fight sequences surprised in the best way.

The film as a whole

The movie swindles between a dramatic, not-so-efficient agent's life and an adult version of Frozen. Inspirations drawn from Kung Fu Panda, with Hrithik clad in a Master Shifu-like robe, were willowed away by the goons running away screaming "That's Kabir! That's Kabir!" — but still, midway, some more goons who probably didn't know tried to fight him in a delayed and sort of easy fight scene. Hrithik's appearance seemed as infelicitous as Deepika wearing a bhagwa-coloured bikini in Jawan.

Some scenes where the direction felt weak: a bag of money open on the ground while Bobby exchanges the Alpha serum, or Durga quickly picking up Ma's ring without even pretending to look for a microsecond.

Some places where I genuinely liked the new-age fighting: the sisters fighting with engagement to the props. Or when Sita protects Durga from the goons in an emotionally eerie quietness, no sounds at all, like a switch flip. This movie was about radical fight scenes — ovation for the fight master and orchestrator.

Another gripping feature of this movie as a whole was the music. The beats, the authenticity of the Punjabi words rightly used, and the rapping across fight scenes, adventure streaks, dance. It was refreshing after all the rinse-repeat Punjabi and Pakistani songs, or the major hits from the 90s that music people have been using like a template.

Pallavi gave a single overall score of 3/5. The category breakdown above is Boxoffy's reading of her review, weighted to average that same 3/5 — it is not her own scoring.

Alpha at the box office.

Alpha released on 3 July 2026, the seventh instalment in the YRF Spy Universe and its first female-led entry. Directed by Shiv Rawail in his feature debut, produced by Aditya Chopra, with a story by Uday Chopra, screenplay by Soumil Shukla and Shridhar Raghavan, and dialogue by Ishita Moitra. It runs 140 minutes.

Against a reported budget of ₹100–150 crore, a worldwide lifetime of ₹98.62 crore means the film did not recover its cost at the midpoint. Bollywood Hungama's own verdict was blunt: mounted on a grand scale, undone by a weak script — which is more or less the argument above, from a completely different reviewer.

The dialogue complaint is not just a matter of taste. It is the single most consistent note across the trade reviews, the audience reaction and this one. For a ₹100 crore-plus film in a franchise this valuable, the writing was the cheapest thing in the budget and the most expensive thing to get wrong.

And then Netflix happened.

Alpha premiered on Netflix on 28 August 2026, 56 days after its theatrical release. What happened next is the reason this review exists.

Estimated watch time

Netflix reports views, not minutes, and does not publish a per-country split. A film debuting at No. 3 on the non-English chart typically lands 3.5 to 5.0 million global views in its first week. At Alpha's 140-minute runtime:

This is the inversion worth sitting with. A film that returned somewhere between 0.66 and 0.99 times its cost in cinemas debuted at No. 3 in the world on streaming and No. 1 in two countries. The audience was always there. It just would not pay ₹245 to find out whether the dialogue was any good.

About the reviewer.

Pallavi Joshi

Guest reviewer · Boxoffy

Pallavi writes about Hindi cinema with an eye for the thing everyone else skips past — the line of dialogue that no working screenwriter would let through, the character beat that contradicts the one before it, the science that a ten-minute search would have fixed. She watches as an audience member first and a critic second, which is why her reviews tend to catch what actually irritates people rather than what is supposed to.

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This guest review is part of Boxoffy's collaboration with independent voices from across the Indian film community. Reviews are the writer's own opinion and are not scored, edited or influenced by Boxoffy's box office desk. Want to contribute? Reach us at info@boxoffy.com.