perfect festive offering

Ali Abbas Zafar gives you an over beefed up 170 minutes bout on the life and times of a wrestling champ who grows from being child to man, loses his child to return to his child-like charm.

The script simply does not have enough to hold you on for nearly three hours and the film’s editors Rameshwar and Bhagat would have done the film yeomen service had they mercilessly chunked out big pieces.

To begin with, this is a Salman Khan film and thus you do not examine it from the usual microscope and criticoscope. It is a different ball game and in the context of that defined premise, offers to the viewer just what he wants. In a way this is a drug pedlar with a variety!

There is so much theatrics, marketing posturing, that the grandeur robs the film of niceties. There is a school of cinema that has a story in place with a character and then a star is put in to enhance it or narrate it. Now it is a radically different approach.

You first have a star and then a character and then the story. The film is thus star-centric and when the star is Salman the Being Human messiah, the tale is not just larger than life but even longer.

The mainstay of the story is thus undoubtedly and unabashedly Salman-centric. It now depends on whether he delivers or not and that in turn depends not so much on whether he is right as it is whether he is Salman enough. That he is. We have Sultan (Salman Khan) in a town in Haryana – the naïve nice innocent yet good for nothing chap who we would all love to have for a pet back home.

He is madly in love with Aarfa (Anushka Sharma) a local wrestling champ with the Olympics in her dreams. Her dad runs the local gym or Vyayamshala. After a public insult by Aarfa, Sultan gets determined and since docs marry docs and engineers marry engineers and since Salman is better suited to be a wrestling champ with not just his shirt off but his pants too, he decides to become a wrestler, update his CV and propose afresh to the aspiring Olympian.

After some long drawn scenes of contrived humour that seems to click, long kite chasing in the streets of an up North town, long training sessions for a wrestler, we have the two getting married and she quickly becoming a mom-to-be. Differences arise when alongside pride; Sultan also develops a huge ego that seems to predict his downfall too.

In the post interval session we have the chief marital players divided due to a huge misunderstanding, Sultan avoiding the ring as if it were plague, collecting monthly donations for a local blood bank till the business tycoon Aakash (Amit Sadh) comes in with a business idea to keep his Mixed Marital Art tournament a la IPL alive. From here the script is what a school kid could imagine. We have these long blood splashing bouts.

We have yet another disgruntled sportsman Fateh Singh (Randeep Hooda) coming in as trainer and the finale. Two steps before you know that the fiery Aarfa is going to get weak kneed and of course the finale when our hero is on the way to winning the championship and inaugurating the town blood bank. The question is not who will win but how gory the blood splash will be at the finals. Our hero is humble but humble pie is not in his menu.

Predictably the film depends entirely on the star value of Salman and he is packaged in strict accordance with his image. He delivers. As does the ever reliable Anushka. She hardly has a role but to ensure her filmography with the Khans, she does a film and ensures she has her moments. Vishal-Shekar give the film the right rustic touch with their music. Arguably this is the spiciest Haleem of the season.

Film Name : Sultan

Cast : Salman Khan, Anushka Sharma, Amit Sadh and Randeep Hooda
Direction : Ali Abbas Zafar
Genre : Drama-action
Likes : Salman, Anushka
Dislikes : Predictable and loud

By L Ravichander