I know it is petty, but throughout the film I kept telling the character played by Shah Rukh Khan to get a haircut and have a shave. I have apparently become my father, but he looks like he has been living in a cave for months without a mirror. The hair looks like a dirty rat's nest and his scraggly beard has no character. A weed patch. It distracted me because SRK has been one of the coolest most appealing actors on earth for 30 years. He has joined in the YRF Spy Universe with this one.


For decades Yash Raj Films were known for their big fat glistening glamorous romances with big stars and filled with lavish musical numbers - they made stars out of SRK, Kajol, Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, the Kapoor sisters, Rani Mukerji and others. But in 2012 they went off in another direction with Ek Tha Tiger, the first in the bombastic over the top Bollywood answer as tardy as they might be to the later Bond films. The YRF Spy Universe. The fourth in so far a series of seven films. Each one it seems more ambitious than the last. That can be the downfall of these plans. Marvel kept having to make them bigger and more absurd till they lost me in their CGI madness. These could suffer the same fate as this is stuffed with CGI and insane flights of fancy.


Pathaan (SRK) is an agent for Indian Intelligence. He is good at his job. So much so that when he is tied to a chair with a dozen men pointing guns at him, you know he will kill them all. He forms a unit of recovering badly injured agents and they are soon on their way to Dubai to stop an organization called Outfit X from kidnapping Indian scientists. Outfit X is a terrorist group for hire and an insane Pakistani General has hired them to kill millions of Indians. Jim runs the group and takes psychopathy to a new level. He is played by John Abraham, an interesting actor because he can do heartthrob characters, but his good looks have a sleazy cruelty in the mouth and eyes that make him a fine villain as well.


Pathaan teams up eventually with an ISI agent, the lovely Deepika Padukone. ISI is Pakistan's intel agency and this is similar to what happens in Ek Tha Tiger. There are a bunch of action set pieces ahead that defy gravity and common sense, but are clever and fun to watch. Salman Khan makes a great cameo literally dropping in on a train to save Pathaan. Pathaan returns the favor in Tiger 3. It is 140 minutes of thrills and idiocy. Not a bad trade off.

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