If John F Kennedy’s immortal line, “Ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country” were to be rendered in an Indian context what would it sound like?
We don’t have to agonize over that question. Shah Rukh in the trailer of Pathaan mouths Kennedy’s line as though he just thought of it.
Plagiarism is a high art-form in canny minds.No sign of that here. Not one frame in the trailer of Pathaan looks original. The uneasy been-there-done-it-all-before feeling follows us from first frame to last, as Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham and Deepika Padukone have themselves a blast.
From what we can see of the three bravehearts in the trailers, they are all fighting for a cause.Shah Rukh Khan looks ruggedly unbathed, and bruised,.John is nicely groomed and washed, enjoying the highlife dreaming of destroying India for no reason except that he is probably bored of watching episodes of Squid Game .
Deepika’s saffron bikini is missing from the trailer. But she does appear in a blonde wig. I kid you not.Dimple Kapadia plays Moneypenny from the Bond series, some kind of a hotshot intelligence officer who has just emerged from a detoxification ayurvedic clinic, trapped in a film that is seem hardly intelligent.Unless anyone finds two grown men acting like characters in a videogame to be intelligent.
I find the whole idea of one braveheart ‘saving’ India from a psychotic scoundrel to be as old as James Bond, and as defunct as Sean Connery.
I don’t think India needs to be ‘saved’ from anything except such films darting pseudo-nationalism where it is suggested that India needs a certain kind of rugged muscle power to be freed from terrorism. Not rogue soldiers, and sanguinary mercenaries. India has its brave jawans on the border to protect the country.
So thanks, but no thanks. Going by the trailer, Pathaan is not interesting enough as cinema nor as a artificial exposition on Indian intelligence. It looks like spillover of Siddharth Anand’s War with neither the raw action of Tiger Shroff nor the wry reactions of Hrithik.
John seems much too prim to be taken seriously as a terrorist.As for Shah Rukh’s Pathaan act, someone mentions it is time to end his banwaas. Whether she means Shah Rukh Khan’s four-year hiatus or the Pathaan who looks like he can do with a serious prolonged session in an ayurvedic clinic(maybe the same one that Dimple attended?) we don’t know.
This is a world looking desperately from detoxification.