HIT 3 Review – Nani Goes Full Beast But the Franchise Loses Its Soul
What Is HIT 3 About
SP Arjun Sarkaar, played by Nani, is a HIT officer unlike anyone the franchise has introduced before. He is aggressive, foul-mouthed, morally complicated, and operating in a space where the line between cop and criminal has almost completely dissolved. When we first meet him he is already in jail for reasons the film deliberately withholds. From prison, he narrates a series of flashbacks that reveal how he went from being the most feared officer in Kashmir to sitting in a cell in Vizag. At the centre of his story is CTK, a dark web network run by a group of psychopaths who livestream ritualistic murders for a paying audience. Arjun goes deep undercover to dismantle them from the inside. What he finds there pushes him and the audience to the very edge of what Telugu mainstream cinema has attempted before.
Story and Screenplay
The first two HIT films worked because they trusted their audience to follow a slow, methodical investigation. The tension in those films came from restraint. HIT 3 abandons that approach almost completely and replaces it with scale, spectacle, and shock. In some ways it is a genuinely bold creative decision. In others it is the film’s most significant miscalculation.
The first half is the strongest section of the film by a considerable distance. Sailesh Kolanu establishes Arjun Sarkaar’s world with real confidence. The CTK network is an unnerving concept that is handled with more intelligence than you might expect from a mainstream Telugu commercial. The investigation sequences are gripping, the pacing is tight, and Nani’s transformation into this version of himself is so complete and convincing that you genuinely forget the actor behind the character. The interval block is one of the most effective in recent Telugu cinema.
The second half is where the film begins to lose the thread. Once the story relocates to Arunachal Pradesh and the CTK games begin in the ruins of a Burmese palace, the film shifts into territory that has been extensively covered by Squid Game. The Squid Game parallels are not subtle and for any viewer who has watched that series, the second half carries an unavoidable feeling of familiarity. Sailesh Kolanu executes these sequences with technical skill but the shadow of influence is too large to ignore.
The villain is the film’s most damaging weakness. Prateik Babbar is tall, physically imposing, and committed to the role. But the writing gives him nothing beyond surface menace. He has no ideology, no backstory worth mentioning, and no real threat level when placed opposite Nani. The HIT franchise has always struggled with its antagonists and HIT 3 does nothing to solve that recurring problem. The climax involving multiple franchise cameos is crowd pleasing in the moment but raises uncomfortable questions about why such firepower was saved for a fight the hero could have won several scenes earlier.
Performances
Nani is extraordinary here. This is not a performance that asks him to be likeable or relatable or any of the things that have defined his career. Arjun Sarkaar is abrasive, physically intimidating, and morally ambiguous in ways Telugu heroes almost never are. Nani commits to every dimension of that without blinking. His profanity-laced dialogue, his controlled rage in the interrogation scenes, his unexpected comic timing even within this darker register, all of it works seamlessly. He does not just play a different character here. He rewrites what people thought he was capable of.
Srinidhi Shetty makes her Telugu debut and handles her role with more confidence than the writing deserves. Her character is functional rather than essential but she never feels out of place. Rao Ramesh is reliable and warm as Arjun’s father figure. Samuthirakani adds quiet dignity to a role that needed exactly that. The cameos from Adivi Sesh and Karthi are handled well and land with genuine emotional weight for fans of the franchise. Prateik Babbar tries hard with what he has been given but the script never gives him enough to work with.
Music and Technical Aspects
Mickey J Meyer delivers a career high. The background score here is aggressive, layered, and completely in sync with the film’s new identity. It is the biggest creative leap in the film outside of Nani’s performance. Sanu John Varghese’s cinematography is outstanding throughout. The Arunachal Pradesh sequences in particular have a visual quality that would not look out of place in an international production. The production design of the CTK palace is striking and memorable. Karthika Srinivas edits the first half with precision but the second half needed another thirty minutes removed to keep the momentum from bleeding out.
Direction
Sailesh Kolanu is a director with a clear vision and genuine technical ability. What HIT 3 reveals is that his ambitions have outpaced his storytelling instincts. The first two HIT films were small, precise, emotionally coherent films that did exactly what they promised. HIT 3 tries to do too much at once and in doing so loses the quality that made the franchise worth following in the first place. The decision to lean into Squid Game territory rather than developing a fully original threat is a creative shortcut that a filmmaker of his calibre should not have needed. There is still a very good director here. He just needs a stronger screenplay to work with.
Final Verdict
HIT 3 is a film that delivers on spectacle and almost completely on performance but only partially on story. Nani reinvents himself in a way that very few Telugu actors would dare attempt and that alone makes the film worth watching. But the franchise that once set itself apart through restraint and emotional precision has now traded those qualities for noise and scale. It is a different kind of HIT film. Whether that is progress or retreat depends entirely on what you valued about the first two. Watch it for Nani. Watch it for Mickey J Meyer. Just do not expect the same emotional payoff that made HIT 1 and HIT 2 so satisfying.
Worth Watching: Yes, especially for Nani fans and thriller lovers Best For: Nani fans, action thriller audience, HIT franchise followers Verdict in One Line: Nani goes full beast, the franchise loses its soul.
