SRK is an action hero now.
A review of Jawan, his latest mass masala idli vada pav entertainer
To understand why a SRK did a film like Jawan, you have to pay attention to what he reveals in the 2023 Netflix documentary ‘The Romantics’. He playfully frets about his career as the Lover Boy of Indian cinema. He says that he once aspired to be an action hero before the overwhelming success of "DDLJ" destined him to a film career of romance and drama. All anybody ever wanted him to be was Raj or Rahul. And so he serenaded audiences for thirty years. But this year - the year of his big comeback - he seems determined to rekindle his original dream and be reborn as a man of action. ‘Pathaan’ saw him (or rather, his stunt double) dangle from helicopters and zip around on snowmobiles while fighting terrorists. With ‘Jawan’, his transformation gets more urgent and reckless.
‘Jawan’ pulls its soul from the ‘angry young man’ genre of film where a vigilante-type tries to take down the corrupt establishment and “fix the system” overnight. Shah Rukh Khan plays Azad, the redeemer —the big guy who stands up for the small guy. With the help with a ragtag group of young women with decidedly uncool codenames (Hacker, Artist, Darling, Doctor), Azad orchestrates a series of public kidnappings. He hijacks a metro trainful of people and demand thousands of crores from the government, which he then urgently distributes to every farmer to clear their tractor loans. All of this, done in a cool five minutes. But not before he delivers a hurried speech to the captives held at gunpoint (as if they care), about “the interest rate on a luxury car loan being 8% but 13% for a tractor. 13%!”.
Azad is quick to put us at ease that he is a gregarious sort of rebel. He wouldn’t harm a mosquito without cause. He is the type to break into a jaunty little dance mid-hijack. And he certainly wouldn’t kill anyone. Even the negotiating officer, Narmada (Nayanthara), brought in to control or capture him, can see that Azad is totally loveable. He is more like the large-hearted Mahesh Babu in ‘Maharshi (2019)’ rather than psychopathic Mahesh Babu in ‘Nijam (2003)’ when it comes his social justice philosophy.
Mass cinema, almost as a rule, does away with logic or heart, but Jawan is especially flippant on both counts. The writing is totally unserious to the point of ridicule. It grapples with big issues but shows complete apathy towards them. Solving farmer suicides? Easy. Fixing healthcare for 1.3 billion people? A five-hour job. Rooting out black money? Just give it a day or two. In a montage of happy farmers, a man readies his noose, but quickly drops it to the floor and hurrahs when he hears his loan has been cleared — it is a moment as ‘masala’ as it is shockingly tone-deaf. I do wonder what real farmers think when they see their problems are paraded out for the sole purpose of propping up the hero as a messiah of the masses.
If the expectation from Jawan is that it churn out a ‘mass moment’ every ten minutes regardless of context, then director-writer Atlee delivers big on that count. He is a man in great hurry. Jawan’s story zooms ahead at lighting speed. Before you can chew down a mouthful of popcorn, a brief courtship has already ended in a marriage. Or yet another complication national issue has been swiftly resolved. A flashback cameo with an effervescent Deepika Padukone is but a brief moment of respite from the nauseating speed of the screenplay.
Entry scenes abound. Although one cannot except much originality in them. The fights and flairs — we’ve seen all these before. Only they now boast better lighting, smoother graphics, and a superstar who is game to play.
Shah Rukh wholeheartedly embraces the “South Indian” style of commercial cinema. He vaults from an entry scene to a joke to a flashback to a fight without missing a beat. He delivers a rousing “sattar-minute” type of monologue about being an ideal citizen that plays to the popular sentiment of the crowds, but that is nonetheless superficial.
Nayantara looks much more comfortable power-walking down a corridor than swaying her skirts around a fog machine. Vijay Sethupathi, who plays a shady businessman that represents all that is wrong with the System is a strangely muted villain. He looks as if he has been coerced onto set and made to mouth Hindi dialog - which he does self-consciously, almost reluctantly.
Jawan often feels like a frustrating marriage between a social drama and commercial entertainer. There are innumerable shots of character shedding tears upon hearing this or that sad flashback — hospitalized children die from lack of oxygen supply, a father hanging himself from the highest branch of the loneliest tree in his village —and yet it still stays soulless and apathetic. The story gave me deja vu with how thematically identical it is to the 2022 Satyadev film ‘Godse’. (Infact, the protagonist of Godse could be considered a more savage, more heartfelt version of Azad.) Whether it was Jawan’s recycled story, its total disregard for its own themes, its so-so music, or its charmless villain, Jawan just didn’t work for me. But at least SRK can call himself a mass action hero now.