Vibe (2026): Kunal Khemu’s Second Outing Is a Great Bromance Trapped Inside a Mediocre Spy Movie

Somewhere around the seventy-minute mark of Vibe, a house party full of drunk Delhi twenty-somethings stops being a house party and starts being a covert operation. The transition is meant to be the film’s hinge, the exact moment Kunal Khemu’s slacker comedy mutates into the espionage thriller its marketing promised. Instead, you can practically hear the air leave the room. The music drops, the framing tightens, the jokes stop landing, and a movie that had spent an hour being effortlessly charming begins the long, laboured process of pretending to be something it isn’t.

That moment is the whole film in miniature. Vibe is at its best when it isn’t trying, when it lets two idiots be idiots in a room together, and at its worst when it remembers it has a plot to service. Khemu, two years removed from the genuinely delightful Madgaon Express, has directed and written himself into a curious trap: he’s made a movie that’s too good at one thing and too self-conscious about the other.

Two Idiots, One Nation, Zero Qualifications

The setup is pure high-concept: Hardik (Khemu), freshly out of rehab and radiating the specific aimlessness of a man who has run out of excuses, and Bugs (Sparsh Shrivastava), an anxious by-the-book type whose entire personality seems calibrated to the office tech floor he works on, get mistakenly folded into a mission run by Preity Zinta’s imperious Madam H. The terrorist threat is real, the stakes are national, and the two men tasked with confronting it can barely order lunch without a committee.

It’s a premise that has powered everything from Rush Hour to Spy, and Khemu’s script understands the fundamental engine: the comedy comes from competence colliding with chaos, not from stupidity alone. Shrivastava, in particular, is doing something smart here, his Bugs isn’t a buffoon but a genuinely anxious man whose rigid systems are the only thing holding him together, which makes his slow dissolution across the runtime both funnier and more affecting than the script sometimes knows what to do with. Khemu, meanwhile, plays Hardik with a loose, reactive quality that lets his co-star drive the comedy while he absorbs it.

The problem is that the film’s most praised element, the bromance, is also its most structurally dangerous. When the two leads share a frame, Vibe breathes. When they don’t, it suffocates.

The Espionage Problem: When the Movie Forgets to Be Fun

Critics have been consistent on this point, and they’re right: the film loses steam the moment espionage takes centre stage. This isn’t a matter of tone-deafness, Khemu clearly knows he’s making a comedy, but of rhythm. The first half, built around the house-party-turned-mission sequence and a series of escalating misunderstandings, operates on a loose, improvisational logic that suits its performers. The second half, forced to actually resolve a terrorist plot, tightens into something more conventional, and the performers visibly strain against it.

Watch the scene where Madam H first briefs the duo. Zinta, a genuinely commanding presence, delivers her exposition with the clipped authority the role demands. But the scene is staged flatly, two-shots, standard coverage, no visual wit, and the dialogue is doing all the work. Compare that to the earlier party sequence, where Khemu’s camera moves with the chaos, catching jokes in the background, letting the frame breathe. The difference isn’t budget or effort. It’s that one scene trusts its performers and the other trusts its plot.

This is the central tension of Vibe: a filmmaker who has clearly grown as a director of comedy but who still hasn’t figured out how to integrate that skill into a genre framework that requires momentum. Where Madgaon Express succeeded by staying small and character-driven, Vibe reaches for national stakes and finds its reach exceeding its grasp. The result isn’t disaster, it’s frustration. You can see the better movie buried inside this one.

What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Just There

The supporting cast is a mixed bag. Yashpal Sharma and Dinesh Lal Yadav are given little to do beyond functional roles, and the antagonist elements tied to the terrorist threat remain frustratingly underdeveloped, the film is never scary, never tense, and never quite commits to the stakes it keeps invoking. Amit Trivedi’s score, including the track “Sipahi Ek, ” is serviceable but rarely rises to the level of the material; it’s the kind of work that supports without defining.

What does define the film is its unapologetically desi sensibility. The humour is specific, rooted in Indian social dynamics and middle-class anxiety, and when it works, a running gag about rehab, a series of escalating lies that spiral beautifully, it’s genuinely funny in a way that feels earned rather than engineered. This is the Khemu who made Madgaon Express, and he’s still here. He just keeps getting interrupted by a plot he doesn’t seem to fully believe in.

For a sense of how another recent Hindi film handled the collision of personal drama and institutional failure, our review of Daayra review is worth revisiting, it’s a useful counterpoint on how tone management can make or break a genre hybrid. And for a look at how a different filmmaker approached the challenge of shifting registers mid-narrative, see our take on Enna Vilai verdict.

Verdict: A Bromance Worth Watching, A Thriller Worth Forgetting

Vibe arrives with a CBFC-mandated A certificate, an anti-drug disclaimer, and muted expletives, all of which feel like artifacts of a film that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. The box office, at ₹0.06 crore net on day one (per Bollywood Hungama), suggests audiences are equally uncertain. That’s a shame, because there’s real talent on display here, particularly in the central partnership between Khemu and Shrivastava, which deserves a better vehicle than this one.

If you’re a fan of quirky desi comedy and can tolerate a second half that loses its nerve, Vibe has enough charm to justify a theatrical trip. If you’re looking for a serious espionage thriller, look elsewhere, this isn’t that, and it never really tries to be. As we frequently examine across Hindi Thriller reviews, the gap between ambition and execution is often the most interesting thing about a movie. Here, it’s also the most frustrating.

Rating: 3/5