Tiger Zinda Hai: Delightfully, predictably & solely Sallu Bhai
Casting: Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sajjad Delfrooz, Paresh Rawal, Sudeep, Angad Bedi, Kumud Mishra, Girish Karnad, Anjalie Gupta, Neha Hinge, Ivan Rodrigues, Nawab Shah
Rated: 7/10
Sallu Bhai is back and his fans are loving it! As expected, he is on a mission to achieve the impossible, and with what consummate ease! Really bhai, it’s much too much!
Salman Khan starts off with outwitting a pack of blood hungry wolves in the snow-ridden Austrian Alps – just throwing them away with his bare hands while on his skiers. He then goes flying into the Syrian crisis where a maniacal Islamic leader is on a killing, subjugating, raping, beheading, human-bombing spree.
Sallu Bhai does the impossible here too — he makes none less than Pakistan’s top ISI agent lehraao the Bharat ka jhanda. And, if that was not enough, makes both the ISI and RAW team up for an incredible mission to save the 25 Indian and 15 Pakistani nurses taken hostage by the stone-faced, Oxonian Islamic terrorist from Chanakyapuri, if you please.
And, just when his one-man antics look like tapering off, Sallu Bhai does what the world had been waiting for with bated breath — he rips off his shirt! The cinema hall full of his fans even at the ungodly 8 am show if you don’t mind, burst into shrieks of decibel hurting degrees as his puffed up chest rippling over an oiled torso demands universal ovation— and gets it too.
On the side, he also cooks up the best kali dal of the century, establishes his bharatiyata with jingo talk, and romances his Pakistani wife Zoya even as an all fit Katrina defies gravity in an indulgently choreographed action sequence all her own and that’s the only time she actually counts in the movie.
But then Sallu bhai ki movie hai so all else has to be irrelevant and fall by the wayside to vegetate along with logic. Meanwhile, bhaijaan goes on with his muscles and his guns, his deep set eyes and his father-figure presence as the leader of a motley crowd of specialist agents tasked to ship into an imminent air raid terrain and ship out some doughty nurses from a hostage situation.
The mission, back-grounded with lovely pulsating music to keep the crescendo on, is not the grooviest of jobs Salman has been on but it will do as this year’s adrenaline pusher. The 200-500-1000 crore talk will definitely follow this one from the YRF stable in which Aditya Chopra has taken a special interest.
But, as said, everything is and will stay in the background as long as Salman Khan, the most intriguing wonder boy of the Indian film industry, sings his way to the top of the cash registers. Yet again, he defines that brains have no meaning when the Khan brawn is on the prowl.
Seldom are the original and the sequel so chinkless in polished but brain-dead delight! The action sequences are slick, the music great and the heropanti on megalomania. After all, Sallu will not like anything less or ordinary, will he? Indeed, Ek Thha and hamesha Rahega the sole Tiger!
Source: The Sunday Pioneer, 24 December, 2017