Pathaan movie review: Shah Rukh Khan zips around a slick, addictive version of the Akshay Kumar universe

Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, Dimple Kapadia, Ashutosh Rana, Cameo: Salman Khan         

Director: Siddharth Anand 

Language: Hindi 

The battle is over Kashmir after the Indian government scrapped its special status under Article 370 of the Constitution. The enemy is a Pakistani Army general.

When director Siddharth Anand’s Pathaan opens with these details, it is natural to wonder if it will go down a path of stereotypical deshbhakti favoured by post-2014 Bollywood in which Indian Muslims are demonised and Pakistanis are caricatured. But no, this is not that kind of film. Instead, right at the start, Pathaan informs us of the deshbhakt protagonist’s Muslim identity without appearing to emphasise it, panders to a populist notion of patriotism that identifies Hindi with the desh (speak to me in Hindi, the hero tells his captors more than once, kyunki Arbi mein tumhe gaali dene mein voh mazaa nahin hai), and an important character assures us that the evil Pakistani is a rogue agent who does not have official sanction for his attack on India.

All this is done without making too much of a song and dance of it. These scenes and dialogues are not exactly understated, but they are not rubbed in our faces either. The writers (screenplay: Shridhar Raghavan, dialogues: Abbas Tyrewala, story: Siddharth Anand) adopt the same tone while introducing us to the Indian terrorist/mercenary called Jim who is colluding with the Pakistani dushman. Jim, of course, is a carefully chosen moniker because making him Hindu would have enraged Hindutva vaadis, and making him Muslim would have antagonised liberals who would have pointed out – rightly – that Hindi cinema in recent years has been playing along with the real-world majoritarian discourse in an India where Muslims are under attack. So, in a bid to play it safe with Hindutva vaadis and with sections of the liberal audience who don’t think too deeply, he is Jim Without A Surname. Like the alcohol-swilling, drug-taking, sexually promiscuous Veronica in Homi Adajania’s Cocktail (2012), Jim’s surnamelessness gives the team of Pathaan enough leeway to argue that they are not throwing another vulnerable minority community under the bus. I mean, his back story could be that he is Jim Sarbh or Jaikumar Menon a.k.a. Jim, correct? This, after all, is not the Akshay Kumar starrer Holiday: A Soldier Is Never Off Duty in which the terrorist was a guy named Allwyn D’souza, leaving no doubt about his religious identity. In Pathaan, he is just Jim. All flanks have been covered. All is well with the world. And we can all go home feeling assured that at least an SRK film did not do to India’s minorities what the rest of Bollywood is doing.

Pathaan does not leave a viewer with too much time to think about these matters anyway. It moves at a breakneck speed. The action is pulsating and grand. Shah Rukh Khan as the eponymous lead is charming. A gorgeous-looking Deepika Padukone seems very much at home beating up gangs of men. John Abraham looks handsome and is as adept as ever at action. The locations are picturesque. DoP Satchith Paulose shoots the settings and stunts with imagination. Women (Deepika and Dimple Kapadia) are given agency, which is rare in a Hindi action adventure. And to top it all, Salman Khan has a smashing cameo in this film as Tiger from Ek Tha Tiger and Tiger Zinda Hai.

It’s a measure of how low Bollywood has fallen in recent years that the absence of cartoonish-looking Muslims and Pakistanis in Pathaan is to be counted as a plus, but well, that’s the way it is. And unlike War, the director’s last film starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff, this one is not condescending towards Muslims either.

Briefly, here’s the story. Taking a leaf out of Baby’s book, SRK in Pathaan is an R&AW member who is part of a covert operations group. He is known simply as Pathaan. Dimple is his boss, Ms Grewal. Deepika plays a Pakistani woman who may or may not be dangerous to India. John is Jim, an ex-R&AW agent who is bitter towards India with good reason – or so we think, until the deshbhakt hero lectures him for having forgotten that a soldier does not ask what his country did for him, he asks what he can do for the country.

Pathaan zips across continents, keeps a stream of wolf-whistle-worthy one-liners and self-referential jokes flowing, and is so much fun when it’s being fun that it is tempting to overlook the superficiality of its politics or its tackier portions. Such as Jim’s downright stupidity in his first encounter with Pathaan and again in their final clash such that its outcome can be seen coming from a mile. Or Pathaan staring at a Russian sex worker’s cleavage and asking her how many “boobles” she wants (ugh!), the schoolboy-level double entendre in a conversation between Pathaan and Deepika’s Rubina about whether he is “in or out”  (eye roll!), or Tiger emerging from an explosion with the words, I’m having a blast (okay, that last one is silly but in a nice way).

This film is part of what the producers, Yash Raj Films (YRF), are calling the YRF Spy Universe with Pathaan coming in the wake of Ek Tha Tiger, Tiger Zinda Hai and War. The four films finally cross paths in this one. The intersection is the best part of Pathaan, incredibly entertaining, featuring crackling chemistry between the two Khans, and maintaining just the right mix of frivolity and an adrenaline rush. Make sure you don’t leave the hall when the end credits start. I saw Pathaan in IMAX 2D. Seeing men’s lives hanging by a thread on a road in Dubai and watching one of the most exhilarating fight scenes filmed on a train is so thoroughly entertaining that it is truly tempting to forget that while Pathaan is not lethal in the way some of Akshay Kumar’s cinema has been in recent years, it is nevertheless doing its own version of pandering and majority appeasement.

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Pathaan is in theatres.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial