Amitabh Bachchan plays a mythological warrior in a withered dystopian city where desert car chases, CGI magic and a semi-divine dictator rule

This fizzy Telugu-language mashup of Indian mythology, martial arts and Bollywood-style dance-romance-and-melodrama plot mechanics, all filtered through a fine sci-fi sieve, is mostly a hoot. Sure, it’s a bit frustrating to sit through almost three hours, with an interval in the middle, only to find that we’re probably less than halfway through the overall saga at the end. But everyone will just have to wait until further instalments from what the film calls the Kalki Cinematic Universe to drop to find out what happens to the teeming cast of characters. Such is the price of living in an age when films are episodic like television or comic books, and everything is part of a franchise, a universe or even multiverse. On some level it’s all so exhausting.

Indeed, the last 15 minutes of Kalki 2898 AD, with a huge pile up of reveals, reversals, shocks and cliff hangers is positively enervating but in a fun way that feels earned by all the groundwork laid out in the previous two and three-quarters hours. It all starts in the battlefield 3,000-odd years ago, where warrior Ashwatthama (played by superstar Amitabh Bachchan), a character in the epic Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata, is cursed by Krishna for trying to kill an unborn child. His punishment is to live for ever until he rights this wrong by saving a future reincarnation of God.