Or maybe not. That’s what was
going on in my mind as I came out after watching Ek Tha Tiger. One of my most
memorable spies of course has been GunMaster G9 – our very own Mithunda saving
India from the world’s deadliest villains.
Indian spies have it tough. Ask
Sunny Deol. He had to even call his movie Hero – Love story of a Spy. Agent
Vinod kept confusing people about whether he loved the girl or not and
audiences kept away from Saif. We need our spies in our own Made for India
format!
But Salman is in a different
league of his own.
And therefore strangely Ek Tha
Tiger is not an out and out Salman movie. Imagine a tiger in the forest and a
tiger in the cage. This film is the cage of Yash Raj Films which keeps Salman
toned down.
The movie to be honest is good. It’s
not Jason Bourne; neither it’s Veer Zara but imagine Pierce Brosnan going all
Hugh Grantish in a Bond movie and you would have figured the movie out. And add to that a Katrina Kaif who seems to
become better with every movie.
Salman’s entry is less than
spectacular in terms of histrionics but fantastic in the use of the slo-mo
camera. He doesn’t let go ever in the movie. It seems he feels the pressure of
a prim and proper studio watching his every move. This movie was made to appeal
to both the urban elite and the urban poor and thus Salman loses his T shirt
only once in the movie.
His films in the last few years
have 2 kinds of audience – the first who watches his movies to claim how mass
minded and absurd it is. And the second, people like me, who still go to the
movies to believe in the magic that Georges Melies had first shown us. We go to
the movies to forget, to laugh, to cry, to love, to suspend reality as my dad
calls it.
It’s the split that’s evident in
India today and the stars who can crossover effectively are becoming rarer.
Salman remains one of them. The intensity in his eyes is still the same that
had made my sisters swoon in the nineties when Maine Pyaar Kiya had released.
His buffed up body looks more chiselled than ever but nowhere in the movie does
it look that he is having a lot of fun doing it. The humour is measured, the
fights are less than fantastic and his dialogues lack the spice that makes him
the darling of the masses. Thankfully Katrina does that with aplomb.
But in the end when ISI and RAW
are both chasing them, and he is shot by his friend, he still rides the bike
towards the plane and in one spectacular jump catches the open door; the prim
and proper Singapore audience erupts in cheers reminding me of my past in
Gaiety Galaxy.
People kept asking me how the
movie was and my answer was simple – it lacked the rustic charm of Dabaang, but
it was worth the ticket. That’s what Bollywood should be about – Paisa Vasool.
1 comment:
Total paisa vasool, yes :D
And I loved the simple humor in the movie.. kind of understated, not bawdy or rustic :)
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