Eventually they assemble.

Sooryavanshi (2021) is the continuation, and perhaps the culmination, of Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe.  Like the other Cop Universe movies, this is not a film about superheroes, but is still follows all the beats of a big superhero team-up movie.  It's not The Avengers, but there's still an awful lot of avenging going on.

The movie starts with a massive amount of exposition, beginning with the 1993 Mumbai bombings, though in this universe ace detective Kabir Shroff (Javed Jaffrey) solved the case in two days, arresting most of the conspirators.  One  of the ringleaders, Bilal Ahmed (Kumud Mishra) fled to Pakistan and the protection of terrorist ringleader Omar Hafeez (Jackie Shroff), who subsequently ordered the creation of a network of sleeper agents spread throughout India and overseen by Riyaz Hafeez (Abhimanyu Singh), Omar's son.

Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) lost both of his parents in the 1993 bombings, and so he has become a superhero maverick cop who plays by his own rules but gets results.  Sooryavanshi has  assembled a small team of loyal subordinates to help him in his rule breaking and results getting, and he repays their loyalty by consistently forgetting their names.  This is played as a humorous quirk, presumably to set Sooryavanshi apart from his fellow maverick cops, but Akshay Kumar is able to set himself apart through the power of acting.

Veer is currently separated from his wife Ria (Katrina Kaif) and son Aryan (Vidhaan Sharma) after an incident when he brought them to a car chase and shootout.  It wasn't entirely deliberate, and he had planned to have them wait in the car, but once he spotted the baddies he pursued them without dropping his family off, and Aryan was wounded.  They try to be civil, but Ria is planning to take Aryan with her to Australia, and I am on Team Ria.

Meanwhile, terrorists.  By this point Kabir Shroff is Joint Chief of Police and Sooryavanshi's boss.  The police have finally discovered Riyaz Hafeez's location, so Shroff sends Sooryavanshi to make the arrest.  After a big action scene, he succeeds, and further investigation leads them to Kader Usmani (Gulshan Grover), a pickpocket turned terrorist now posing as a Muslim religious leader.  They don't have enough evidence to charge Usmani with anything, and he's too politically connected to arrest anyway, but Sooryavanshi still insists on making a dramatic speech and threatening future arrest.

All of that is enough to make Hafeez Senior send Bilal back to India to retrieve a hidden store of highly explosive RDX, and to activate the scattered sleeper agents.  The explosives are retrieved, Riyaz is broken out of prison, and plans are made to hit Mumbai with a massive attack, including six carefully placed bombs and a direct assault on the Anti-Terrorism Squad headquarters.  

Can Sooryavanshi foil the terrorists and patch things up with his estranged wife?  Yes, but he'll need help from the other Cop Universe heroes, Simmba (Ranveer Singh) and Singham (Ajay Devgn).  And it's when the crossover starts that things begin to get really interesting, because while our three heroes are the same type of character, their respective movies fall into different subgenres, and they bring their genres with them.  Sooryavanshi is probably the most typical of the three, a cop on the edge with an estranged wife, and more often than not he wins through persistence and dangerous stunts.  He's the John McClane of the group.

Simmba is different. He's wisecracking and genre aware, like Dirty Harry as played by Bugs Bunny, and when he takes the spotlight the movie takes a sharp turn into comedy.  And Singham is a surly and hypercompetent badass; while everybody gets their share of ridiculous action movie stunts, the laws of physics seem to bend in Singham's presence.

If you like ridiculous action movies, then you are in luck.  This is a very well made ridiculous action movie.  The plot is simple but presented sincerely, and the many big action scenes are as fun as they are implausible.  (Yes, that does mean that the action scenes become more fun when Singham finally shows up.)  

However, the movie has the same problem that the other Cop Universe films share; simply put, they're cops.  They are cops who are happy to bend and break any rule that they please, up to and including torturing and summarily executing their opponents.  Because it's a movie, we know that the bad guys really are bad, but that sort of behavior would be scary when practiced by mere superpowered vigilantes.  Uniformed agents of the government taking the law into their own hands in that way is much scarier.  By all means enjoy the fun action movie, but remember that with police power there must also come police responsibility.