REVIEW: Tiger Zinda Hai, but Thoda Slow Hai, Aur Boring Bhi

Tiger 3, like its predecessors, is a globe-trotting action thriller from the YRF Spy Universe whose desi, Bharatiya heart throbs for akhand Hindustan.

The YRF Spy Universe, born in 2012 with director Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger, settled on what sells and since box-office confirmed all its assertions, it has been dishing out same-to-same stuff since, with variations of lead stars, patriotic missions and evil terrorists: Bharatiya self-aggrandising with an inflated sense of India’s stealth sells; desh-bhakti sells; aggressive, dogged and indomitable Indian spies defending the Indian state sells; a good Hindu spy in love with a good Muslim spy sells; Hindustan is a large-hearted, good-natured desh, with a few good Muslims devoted to Bharat Ma sells. So it is with Tiger 3.

Tiger 3, whose story is by Aditya Chopra and screenplay is written by Shridhar Raghavan (who also wrote Pathaan, War, and adapted screenplays like The Night Manager, Criminal Justice for OTT), is bookended by military coups in Pakistan — there was one in the past where Pakistan’s wazir-e-azam (Prime Minister), was ousted by Pervez Musharraf, and there’s one in present-day Pakistan where the wazir-e-azam is under attack by rogue ISI agents.

Tiger 3 opens with a flashback to London in 1999 when Zoya was a school-going girl and lived with her father. He, unfortunately, was blown up during the Musharraf coup. Though underage, she joined ISI under the guardianship of Aatish Rehman (Emraan Hashmi).

In the present we see Zoya (Katrina Kaif) in semi-retirement, playing devoted mummy to Junior (Sartaaj Kakkar) and loving wife to Tiger (Salman Khan).

A RAW agent, Tiger is sent by his new boss, Maithili Menon (Revathi), to rescue an Indian agent who, in his dying moment, shares a tip with him — something very bad is being planned by a dangerous, new outfit. He drops a name and immediately Tiger’s world begins to drown in his sorrow and tears.

But duty to desh comes first, so Tiger goes off to assist in an India-Pakistan peace mission. But a rogue ISI agent’s plans to jeopardise this meeting are thwarted when Tiger kills a pregnant lady. Immediately some bad guys reach Tiger’s home carrying an injection. They point it towards Junior who has turned pale.

The bad spies blackmail papa Tiger and mummy Zoya to ditch desh and get something that will be desh-droh and the end of Pakistan’s good Prime Minister Nasreen Irani (Simran) who wants to cut the country’s military budget in half if the Indian government responds with a determined push for aman.  

Tiger and Zoya travel to many countries to save Junior, but as the bad guys begin to congregate, Tiger calls in reinforcements.

Several people arrive, but none of them are relevant or interesting. They exist simply to populate two groups — the Good Guys who are with India and in the pursuit of peace, and the Baddies who are anti-aman and in pursuit of power.

Tiger operates with the possibility of everyone around him, including those closest to him, being double agents.

Tiger 3 has lots of arms, ammunition and several Mission Impossible-inspired action sequences.

Both Tiger and Zoya are ambidextrous and shoot guns akimbo. I have it from various PR sources that Katrina Kaif did her own action scenes in the film. She is excellent.

The action sequences in Tiger 3 are impressive. Yet they don’t elevate the film’s pulse. In fact, I felt no thrill, not even when Zoya and an evil lady, both wrapped in towels and lying in a beautiful Turkish bath, began kicking and hitting each other. At some point, one towel disappears and the two ladies are fighting to keep themselves wrapped.

Though the gaze is not titillating, and Katrina Kaif delivers smooth, sharp kicks, keeping the proceedings as dignified as possible, the idea itself irritated me.

The YRF Spy Universe must entrust the next instalment of Tiger to Farah Khan. She’ll not just go for some serious filmy entertainment, but may also drape the hero and the villain in towels and throw buckets of water at them. If nothing else, it will give us a moment to rival Dard-e-Disco. 

YRF’s Tiger Enterprise rests on Salman Khan and his ability to convince us that Tiger can stay airborne on screen for as long as he wants.

But Salman is now 57 years old, close to retirement if he were really a RAW spy. 

As actors get older, their body movement gets restricted. And sadly, in the age of botox, fillers, plastic surgery, VFX and airbrushing, they are deprived of facial expressions, too.

Salman Khan barely acts anyway. In fact, I can’t recall him acting in any film since the 2010 Dabangg. All his roles since have been a collage of poses and long-held expressions with some action and one-liners in between — creation of clever editors who have cut action and dialogue scenes to insert shots of his smokey eyes with happy or angry expressions.

Yet there’s power in his screen presence that he draws from his real-life, one that has been stripped of all scandals and controversies  by reputation-makeover experts. Salman Khan’s on-screen power comes from the carefully curated image of a boy-man with a soft heart, a boy-man devoted to his family, friends and, above all, his Ma.

That’s why, even when he can barely pretend to play the violin in Tiger 3’s Ruaan, Ruaan song, our focus is not on how bad he is. Instead it is in the subtext of his rumoured past with  Katrina Kaif and her subsequent marriage to Vicky Kaushal as he sings, “…dekh tujhpe hi dobara/yaar mar jaun kahin na.”

Big Bollywood directors who are backed by big production houses know how to leverage this, but they often don’t go beyond it to mitigate the Salman handicap and make sure their film itself is exciting enough, with or without Salman Khan.

Director Maneesh Sharma’s Tiger 3 wilts and bores when Salman and Katrina and not on the screen.

Large swathes of the film are wasted as we are made to stare at inconsequential men and women doing dull things. In these scenes, that come often and run into several minutes before, during and after an action set-piece, nothing interesting is said or done. For a commercial film whose sole purpose is to entertain, this is unpardonable. 

These in-between moments could have been interesting if they had been written with some love and care, or were entrusted to good actors, like the one-decent-line-each characters played by Revathi and Kumud Mishra.

Alas, they are not.

After 156 minutes of watching Pakistani military tanks and bombs going off, keeping up with some pacy bike and car chases, worrying about heroes as they dangled from ropes, helicopters, parachutes, and marvelling at Katrina Kaif who uses her thighs as much as her arms to pin down baddies, all I was left with is one moment and one feeling.

Director Maneesh Sharma, who made Band Baaja Baraat, Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Fan, is not a guns and tanks guy. That’s perhaps why the only time Tiger 3 begins to pulsate is when a ball rolls on to the screen, followed by a flying Pathaan.

Pathaan needed Tiger once. Now Tiger needs Pathaan. That’s the moment. A delicious, pleasant one.

And the feeling that has stayed with me comes from the message underlying all of Tiger 3’s hyper patriotism.

In between the film’s action, mayhem and desh-bhakti is a spirited defence of democracy against dictatorship. There’s also talk of azaadi, ofpeacewith Pakistan and a simple life-lesson that is delivered twice:

“Burre waqt, adab se pesh aa/Kyun ki waqt badalne mein waqt nahin lagta”.

Oh that sweet, sweet feeling of knowing that when it wants to be, Bollywood can be shape and subtle.