Bade Miyan Chote Miyan might be about the ills of creating super soldiers but the real super power of this film is expanding time. Five-minute countdowns stretch into 15 minutes, one night feels like two and three days of action seem to last a fortnight.
Indian armed forces have created a one-of-a-kind defence weapon that they are transporting to a secure location when they are attacked openly by a mask-wearing menace who promises retribution. The only two people who can get this weapon back from the enemy are disgraced soldiers Rambo and Rowdy Rathore, oops, we mean Rocky (Tiger Shroff) and Freddy (Akshay Kumar) — in our defence, Rocky is always in torn vests ala Rambo, and Freddy has the Rowdy Rathore moustache.
The story of their heroics is told in flashbacks, and each flashback comes with a song-and-dance routine that sticks out like a sore thumb. There is a lot of banter between Akshay and Tiger, mostly age-related, and it is so stilted that it doesn’t draw a single laugh. Hobbs and Shaw these two are not, especially since there is absolutely no chemistry between them to speak of.
In fact, Amitabh Bachchan and Govinda, the two cops from the original Bade Miyan Chote Miyan film released in 1998, had more chemistry than these two. Our two quipping deadly duo — the only standout dialogue being Rocky’s comment on how there is nepotism even in terrorism — are helped out by Captain Misha (Manushi Chillar) and tech wiz Pam (Alaya F), who despite significant roles are somehow turned into tokenisms. And Sonakshi Sinha spends most of her ‘special appearance’ screen time unconscious.
What Ali Abbas Zafar’s film does, however, is move along at breakneck speed, preventing any time spent on comprehending what is unfolding on screen, which is as derivative as it is ludicrous — for example, the villain is using a vault made by the UK royalty, there are explosions and street chases in the UK and no one bats an eyelash. This is one mega action set piece after another with enough explosions to overshadow even Michael Bay. The only time the action stops is to let the villain Kabir (Prithviraj Sukumaran) provide expositions in a gravelly baritone. It is telling that the villain has more solid dialogues than the two heroes put together.
As mentioned earlier, our heroes’ real super power is stretching time. Whether they have a few hours to rescue hostages, which turns into a night-long mayhem, or they have five minutes to stop missiles being fired at the enemies to start a war, which is when they get busy getting their swag on, the scenes drag endlessly and the two-hour-44-minute film feels like it lasted hours.
Truly, ‘bade miya toh bade miyan, chote miyan subhanallah’, and, no, it is not meant as a compliment.
