'Tiger 3' movie review: That’s Tiger’s turd part

Tiger 3 still

Movie Name: Tiger 3
Director: Maneesh Sharma
Actors: Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif
Rating: 1.5/5

Pathaan (i.e. Shah Rukh Khan) makes a longish appearance in Tiger 3. That's not a spoiler. It's the only reason you'll watch this film, if at all. I've done the festival needful for Bhai - sat full-frontal row, first day show.

And felt nothing at all, throughout, but for that SRK cameo sequence, set on a vertigo inducing bridge, with mountains on both sides, as the two heroes fly around to hold on to a chopper, with whistles blowing at my cinema. This is SRK's Pathaan, as much rescuing Tiger, from a Pakistani prison, as the audience itself from this film.

You also sense in that scene how strikingly fresh/sorted SRK looks in the action genre, post Pathaan, Jawan. Salman Khan, the hero of this franchise, on the other hand, while rugged enough to play Tiger, appears slightly bloated, jaded, even tired, perhaps.

Either way, what you have before you is a Yash Raj reproduction, with producer Aditya Chopra (credited for story-line), as the ringmaster of a recurring circus - with multiple series starring, separately, SRK (Pathaan), Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff (War) - named the ‘spy universe'. It really started with a pretty whacked out yet semi-realistic Ek Tha Tiger (2012), didn't it?

This turd part starts off with the backstory, circa 1999, of the female-lead, the Pakistani ISI agent (Katrina Kaif), married to Tiger. And you feel here as if they may be up to something. The villain (Emraan Hashmi) is suitably introduced.

He's a strange kinda creature with issues/motivations that are hard to define. This villain bloke is pissed, because of the number of Pakistanis killed in the Kargil war - so huge that they can't number them anymore.

But, well, it's the Pakistanis who infiltrated Kargil, no? He's angrier still for the fact that his pregnant wife (Ridhi Dogra) died executing an assassination. But she was the one trying to kill off the Indian Army general!

The usual calculation for the action hero to rise is if the antagonist is worth that effort. The Emraan Hashmi villain wholly fades away after sometime.

What you're left with is a non-stop series of stunts and sceneries, over a totally joyless, humourless starship enterprise. To be fair, the fireworks are first-rate. You can tell the sort of effort that's gone behind pulling off set-pieces over a multi-city tour, traversing Russia, Turkey, Austria, and some place or the other passing off as Pakistan.

Surely, they got some bulk discount on the locations. It's easy to merge some from Pathaan into Tiger. The other sequence that stands out is the stellar motorbike chase, atop building terraces after another. Besides Katrina fighting a Chinese spy in a bath towel, of course. They just come and go.

There is the usual, positive delusions/delulu about India's place under the sun as the RAW agent goes around setting the world on fire. Otherwise, the rules of the game are simple: You root for the frickin' hero. Doesn't matter what he does, or how, when, and why. Can you complicate this still? Hell, yeah.

So, let's just try and understand ‘travel agent' Tiger, whose real name is Avinash, in the first place. He's been off his agency R&AW for two years. Unsure why. He's back in action still, with top-grade weapons, executing heavy-duty missions, recruiting fellows from his own (former) agency. I don't know how.

At some point, you watch Pak and Indian spies gone rogue, fighting on the same side, trying to save Pakistan from slipping into the clutches of its own military establishment. Hard to tell what that means!

Things start to seem so complex after a while that I actually began to wrack my brains to decipher this mumbo-jumbo over the Pak PM delivering an address to her nation, from a bunker under her office/housing complex. Yup, I scratched my head. The audiences probably won't. They'd probably wanna overlook all of it.
Which is the only spoiler one must reveal about this film. That they've attempted a supposedly, albeit randomly complex script in a Salman flick! Seriously, why bother? As the old adage goes: keep it simple, stupid!