Take a larger-than-life superstar, add a director who excels at over-the-top action, drama and song-and-dance routines, double the dose, weave in some timely social messages and solid supporting acts, stir in not one, not two, but seven dhansu hero citi-taali entries, sprinkle a few great cameos as garnish and you get a massive, massy entertainer like Jawan that is pan-Indian cinema at its most entertaining.
Everything about Shah Rukh Khan and Atlee’s Jawan is over the top. Motorcycle-flying, car-flipping, superhero landing-ridden action set pieces to the pulse-pounding background score, tear-jerking drama and brutal violence, there is nothing subtle about this vigilante action flick. From his first Moon Knight-style appearance in a tiny village somewhere near the Indian border where he impales, hacks and shoots bad guys to save the village to his second Moon Knight-style appearance on a Mumbai metro where he hams up his villainy to comic proportions, to third, fourth, fifth… you get the drift… appearance, SRK owns the screen.
Yes, this Robin Hood (SRK’s character holds people hostage to right wrongs) has his band of merry women — an ethical hacker, an actor, a doctor, the daughter of a farmer, a mother, an artist — without whom his missions would fail, but they are just ingredients that sharpen the superstar’s appeal.
It’s a Shah Rukh Khan show all the way, whether he is the younger man who is out to right social wrongs, romancing the leading lady and charming little girls, or the patriotic ‘baap’ who is a killing machine with a faulty memory. Sparks fly when younger SRK as Azad Rathore and older SRK as Vikram Rathore share the screen. The double role is the ace in the hole. When senior Rathore tells the villain ‘bete ko haath lagane se pehle baap se baat kar’, the audience erupts not just because of the filminess of the dialogue but because it feels like SRK is addressing on reel what he has been silent about in real life.
The flipside to Jawan being a Shah Rukh Khan show is that the rest of the characters are never fleshed out as well, especially the six women who are part of Azad’s team. While we get some background on a couple of the girls, most are just cogs in the wheel. Even Nayanthara, in her Hindi film debut, fails to make a mark as an intelligence officer and Azad’s love interest, Narmada, despite her slo-mo appearances.
But it is not entirely her fault nor that of the writing. It is that much difficult to live up to the presence and charisma of King Khan. The only one who is able to match it, even if she is on screen for all of 15 minutes is Deepika Padukone, who plays Aishwarya, Vikram Rathore’s wife. Nayanthara didn’t stand a chance next to the Shah Rukh-Deepika chemistry, whether they were singing and dancing Chennai Express-style or pairing up for hand-to-hand combat.
Vijay Sethupathi as the villain Kaalie (he is Marathi but speaks with a Tamil accent; ah well, who cares because he is delightful), with his menace and dead-eyed stare, is also formidable and more than a match for Shah Rukh. There is another special cameo that is mention-worthy but we don’t want to spoil the fun!
What can be spelt out is how high-octane the action sequences are. Whether it is the daring escape from the Mumbai Metro using a tech-controlled machine gun (where do the guns come from? Don’t ask) or hijacking a convoy of trucks carrying money or Kaalie taking on Azad and Vikram, every scene is beautifully choreographed and executed. Who would have thought that Shah Rukh would ace the action-hero role at age 57!
But Jawan is not just mindless fight sequences. The film addresses topical issues — farmer suicides, inadequacies of the public healthcare system, coporate greed and unethical industry, even if the flashbacks and flashforwards cause jarring breaks in the narrative. Every time SRK got justice for the helpless, the hall roared. But it’s his monologue about not accepting a corrupt government, about exercising one’s right to vote judiciously and to ask questions to those in power that brought the hall down. The message, coming months before the Indian general elections, feels too timely to be a coincidence.
With Pathaan, SRK proved he is still King Khan. With Jawan, he has proved he is only going upwards. Massy, messy and massive, as one SRK fan in the movie hall put it, ‘Jawan khatarnak chalnewala hai’. I’ve got tickets for a second watch. What about you?