Tubelight: This tubelight is fused

It’s unfortunate and sad. But Tubelight lives up to its title, not its star. It is a slow, un-gripping drama with no sense of direction whatsoever, or any forward movement. Much like a fused tube light, it works too hard to light up the proceedings, but fails to do so.

So linear it is in dimension that despite the star power of Salman Khan, the aerial landscaping of the film by Kabir Khan, some hummable songs and a Hindi-Chini bhai bhai theme, fails to capture your interest, let alone your imagination.

There’s no fun in the film, absolutely no Sallu bhai stuff for which the public throngs to the cinema hall with sitees and taalis with that first-day-first-show mania. Instead of being that chavanni uchhaal superstar, Salman is made to look like one of those glycerine characters in a saas-bahu show on TV, crying away, mostly needlessly, to glory. He cries through the film, and tediously plays a soppy, sloppy, retarded and tedious character in an angelic mountain village near the India-China border in Uttarakhand.

Really, he is so stuck up that he is unable to decide “yahan se royun ya wahan se.” Salman Khan for us is relevant only when he comes with rippling muscles, oodles of naughtiness, backstreet boy macho presence and a general camaradarie with front benchers. None of this happens to him in Tubelight where he runs the show as a fat, loose-clothing village boy hung up on his fat — both in the body and the mind.

Kabir Khan, the director who has perfected the art of fantastically showcasing Salman Khan, goes shockingly wrong in this one and one wonders why so soon after Bajrangi Bhaijaan.

Unbelievable, but Sallu does not even rip off his shirt in this one, and don’t even think about romancing the girl. His most crackling chemistry is with Shah Rukh Khan who is the only surprise in the film which is otherwise truly a home production of the Khans, what with bhai Sohail trying to make the most of bhai Salman’s super stardom as mother and father and the lot produce this blunder with familial indulgence.

Source: Sunday Pioeer, 25 June, 2017