Alia Bhatt and Sharvari were supposed to be the moment YRF's Spy Universe finally handed the reins to women. Instead, going by early reviews, Alpha has turned into a familiar story big stars, bigger budget, and a screenplay that can't keep up with either.
The film, directed by debutant Shiv Rawail and produced by Aditya Chopra, is the seventh installment in the franchise that gave us Tiger, Pathaan and War. It released on July 3, 2026, and critics have wasted no time picking apart what works and what very much doesn't.
Strip away the gloss and Alpha is a fairly straightforward family melodrama wearing a spy thriller's clothes. Anil Kapoor plays RAW chief Vikrant Kaul, whose wife dies giving birth to twin daughters Sita and Durga.
Bobby Deol's character abducts one of the twins and raises her as a ruthless soldier, setting up the sisters-turned-adversaries plot that drives the film. One version of events even has Kapoor stealing an experimental super-soldier serum called "Alpha" to save his wife, which is where the film gets its title.
It's an ambitious setup on paper. The problem, according to several reviewers, is what happens once the premise is in place.
If there's a consistent thread running through the reviews, it's sympathy for Sharvari. Multiple critics feel she's given less to work with than Bhatt despite carrying equal narrative weight. She reportedly gets noticeably less screen time than Bhatt, yet still makes every scene count, playing Durga as convincing, fierce and impressive in the action sequences.
Another review went further, arguing she manages to deliver excellence once again, balancing emotion and lethality with real chemistry between the two sisters.
It's the kind of praise that comes with a shrug - good performance, wasted potential.
If there's one thing every single review agrees on, it's this: the film wakes up the second Hrithik Roshan shows up. Reprising his War role as Major Kabir Dhaliwal, his appearance has been described as the film's biggest highlight the theatre reportedly comes alive the moment he walks in, with his punches, kicks and screen presence standing out as among the strongest elements in the whole film.
Not everyone was as generous, though one critic dismissed the cameo as underused given the actor's stature.
The consensus criticism circles around three things: logic, pacing, and emotional payoff. One reviewer didn't hold back, calling out a twist involving Bobby Deol's character as one of the weakest in recent memory, questioning how a soldier from across the border could rise to colonel rank without any background checks.
The same review argued the second half loses its grip almost entirely, saved only briefly by Roshan's cameo before sliding into a flat, predictable climax.
Others took aim at the writing itself. Much of the dialogue has been described as flat and forgettable, with punchlines that fail to land and a script that never gives its characters a genuinely memorable moment. Even the film's music, usually a YRF strong suit, got only lukewarm reviews it's the background score rather than the actual songs that carries the film, adding weight whenever Bhatt and Sharvari are on screen with their weapons drawn.
Ratings across outlets are landing in a familiar middle zone mostly two-and-a-half to three stars, occasionally lower. The recurring complaint isn't that Alpha looks cheap; by most accounts, the production value, choreography, and Kashmir-to-Spain scale are exactly what you'd expect from YRF's biggest franchise. It's that none of it is in service of a story with real stakes.
For a film built around two sisters torn apart by circumstance, the emotional core feels curiously absent — audiences are told to feel things without ever being given quite enough reason to. Bhatt and Sharvari clearly did the physical work.
Whether the film around them did its share of the work is a different question entirely, and right now, critics seem split on the answer leaning toward no.
