There is a moment in "Alpha" when Alia Bhatt, playing an assassin engineered from birth to feel nothing, stares into the middle distance while a synthesizer throbs beneath her, and I realized I had been waiting for that moment for two and a half hours without knowing it — the moment when the film would finally tell me what it was about. It never does. "Alpha" is the seventh entry in Yash Raj Films' Spy Universe, and it wants very badly to be a origin myth, a sisterhood story, a stylish action spectacle, and a tragedy about stolen childhood, all at once. It succeeds at being loud.

The premise, on paper, has some promise: a girl raised in isolation by a rogue commander (Bobby Deol, all cheekbones and menace) as a living weapon, who discovers the truth of her bloodline and joins forces with a sister she never knew to bring the whole rotten program down. This is the kind of story that has powered good films before — "La Femme Nikita," parts of the Bourne series, even "Kill Bill" leaned on the same bones. What those films understood, and what "Alpha" does not, is that the audience needs to believe the character was a person before she became a weapon. We are told Alia's character lost her childhood. We are never shown what a childhood might have meant to her, or to us.

Instead, the film moves the way a highlight reel moves: from one kinetic set piece to the next, with narrative connective tissue reduced to exposition delivered mid-sprint. Alia Bhatt and Sharvari are put through their paces in Kashmir, in Mumbai, in what I believe is meant to be Europe, dispatching goons with the kind of gravity-defying, CGI-assisted choreography that has become the house style of this franchise. The stunts are competently mounted. I have no complaints about the mechanics of the violence. My complaint is that the violence has nothing underneath it — no dread, no cost, no sense that these two women are anything other than very fit people performing an itinerary.

Anil Kapoor turns up in the kind of role that exists mainly to explain plot to other characters, and does it with the weary professionalism of an actor who has done this exact scene in three other franchise films this decade. Bobby Deol, who was genuinely unsettling as the villain of "Animal," is here reduced to scowling at monitors. Only Dia Mirza, in a handful of minutes as the mother of Bhatt's character, suggests the movie that might have been — she plays grief as something specific and lived-in, and then the film moves on, because it has somewhere else to be.

Malick, in "Badlands," found meaning in the emptiness of his landscape and the blankness of his killers precisely because he let us sit with the blankness — he trusted silence. "Alpha" trusts nothing. It cannot leave a frame unscored, a beat unexplained, a pause unfilled. Where a Kit and a Holly moved through the world as though narrating their own legend to themselves, Alia's character and her sister move through the world as though they are late for the next scheduled explosion. The screenplay, credited to four writers, has the assembled quality of a franchise document rather than a story someone needed to tell. Shubhra Gupta, reviewing the film for The Indian Express, called its writing borrowed and stale, and I cannot improve on that description; I can only add that a film can survive a familiar plot if it has a point of view, and this one has a marketing plan instead.

What "Alpha" is missing is not craft. The frames are polished, the stunts are drilled, the two leads commit fully to material that does not deserve their commitment. What it is missing is a soul — some animating idea about what it costs a person to be made into a weapon, some curiosity about the girl underneath the training. Without that, the film is all chassis and no engine: expensive, glossy, and hollow at the center, the cinematic equivalent of a Dictaphone message recorded by someone who mistakes noise for meaning.