Director: Siddharth Anand
Writers: Shridhar Raghavan (screenplay), Abbas Tyrewala (dialogues), Siddharth Anand (story)
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Deepika Padukone
To begin at the beginning, Deepika Padukone’s saffron sarong-bikini in the song ‘Besharam Rang’ has not been edited out or censored into a different colour. It is still very much saffron, very much revealing, very much silken, very much sexy, not cowering to the sinister, clownish demands of lily-livered trolls. This is the film’s confident posture. That it has no one to be afraid of and no anticipated criticism that it must tip-toe around — except, perhaps, dubbing over ‘PM’ as ‘President’ in a scene which did not need this swapping. The film knows what it wants to say, and refusing to dim its politics for the right or serrate it for the left, it blazes forth as a long silsila of action sequences.
A long silsila of action sequences is, perhaps, an uncharitable way of looking at Pathaan — as a mere collection of violence of varying intensities, in varying mediums, some on air, some on land, some on a truck or a train barrelling between earth and sky. There is even arctic water under crumbling ice sheets, briefly. Wings erupt in the clouds, as lungs balloon underwater. It is, however, also not wholly untrue to reduce this film to its action, given that every fifteen minutes, we are thrust into another bullet barter, another fisting, another thumping of muscles, another set of explosions, of sculpting air with rapid limbic flexes. This is, after all, an action film in the truest sense of the genre, that is, a complete renunciation of character development, where depth is swapped for doubt — who a character is keeps changing, with revelations pouring in every now and then, and that new revelation becomes the “character”. There is, in this film, a preference to vomit backstories in hurls of dialogue while burnishing the audience’s singular faith that the hero will tower, always. If you can sense the forced hand of the scriptwriter in such moments of dense, unconvincing exposition, it is not because this is a bad action film, but because it is a good one that refuses to challenge too much of the genre’s limitations.
