Pathaan - Review Thread

Pathaan is presently the highest grossing movie of the year in India and the second highest grossing Hindi-language film of all time and it also got a lot of press in the Western media when it came out, in part out of curiosity to see if it would gain a western following like RRR did last year. That didn’t really happen, in part because it seems to be banking a lot on the goodwill surrounding its star, a monumentally famous Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, who is not so famous among crossover audiences. I actually was at least a little familiar with him from his work in the 1995 film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in which he plays this kind of scrawny lover boy. It would seem that in the nearly thirty years since he made that movie he took up weight lifting and possibly steroids because he’s positively jacked here and seems to be trying to make a late career push towards action like Tom Cruise has. In fact I’m reasonably positive that Tom Cruise was the direct inspiration for what he’s trying to do because this movie is basically a hyper charged ripoff of the Mission: Impossible franchise, or at least as much of a ripoff as something can be of such a generic series. Usually when you get foreign filmmakers making their own gonzo take on American blockbusters they benefit from featuring more daring (and dangerous) stunt work but here we get the inverse: Tom Cruise’s films seem like their filled with all kinds of genuine danger while this movie seems to have a lot of CGI and green screens and a lot of the action scenes are cornily overdone. That having been said I would say that this probably does fit with western expectations a bit better than a lot of other recent Bollywood films. For one, it only features one out of place musical scene in the body of the film (plus one during the credits) and it’s relatively toned down, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you’re looking for. Additionally Shah Rukh Khan feels a bit grittier and less polished here than a lot of the heroes I see in these movies and you can see why this guy has been a pretty big deal in that world. Overall though, while the movie does basically work on its own terms I don’t think there’s much to see here for people who aren’t otherwise inclined towards Bollywood, it’s kind of just a slightly wackier version of what Hollywood pumps out with higher production values.