Tag Archives: Movie Review

Salman Khan’s Tiger 3 (2023) Movie Review: Family Man Saving Terrorist State

The Tiger series started with Kabir Khan helming them and it was like a breath of fresh air for YRF who generally are seen to follow trends but never create anything new in terms of storytelling or genre. While the first part was a combination of docu-fiction from Kabir plus Bollywood pulp, it had the right amount of wit, romance, and action to make audiences hooked to it.

Then came the second part (Tiger Zinda Hai) , which I feel was the best, as it upped the ante in terms of emotion and action and gave Katrina Kaif a space which was not even visible in the first part. I was eager to watch the third part considering that I enjoyed the first two parts purely as pulp and was keen to see how Maneesh Sharma brings something new to the table.

Considering this is the first genuine film in the so called YRF Spy universe, the prologue was interesting and it sets up the tone for the film. What follows is an interesting sort of marital discord or suspicion in a spy thriller. This film’s best writing is seen for the first 30 minutes and then somehow the magic is not maintained. I would love to see such a tango between a husband and wife.

The action sequences are entertaining, the best one do not feature Salman but Katrina in a Turkish hamam. Tiger 3 also shows how Bollywood has moved on, there are no songs in the movie, apart from one which is also used to move narrative compared to the first part where songs were a must. The movie also sticks to its genre and it kind of becomes tiring for the audience as I missed the wit and banter of the first two parts.

Spoiler Alert Starts

Now coming to the cameo-

The Shah Rukh Khan cameo does not work at all, one reason being he does not have a loyal fan following like Salman and his screen presence is lacking. It may be because we are used to seeing Salman as Tiger so the charisma of character and star was there. Pathaan is just one film old, and people who enjoyed it were experiencing it as SRK’s comeback and not the character.

Moreover, the situation here is the same as that of Pathaan so it adds to drudgery and Tiger is a way bigger character than Pathaan in minds of viewers. Sadly, all jokes fall flat right from homage to Sholay to Karan Arjun in this scene. And the movie’s weakest action sequence is this rescue scene.

End of Spoiler Alert

Salman does what is required of him, and it works. The film does not require heavy duty acting. Emraan Hashmi as the central antagonist is given a raw deal and I wish the character was written more deeply. Katrina deserves her stand alone film as Zoya.

My major problem with the film is that while the first half is personal for both Tiger and Zoya, the second half is all about saving Pakistan and their democracy. There in lies the problem, the country has not seen a democratically elected government serving the full 5 years term since the formation of the country. Pakistanis do not care about democracy.

The stake for Indian audiences is bare minimum since there is no harm to India. It is like watching a James Bond movie where he saves the Russian Communist regime instead of handling threats which the UK is facing.

Also considering that YRF do not read or have this rose-tinted notion of Pakistan, in the movie it is implied only rogue ISI is against India, when even an uneducated Indian knows that Pakistan’s identity is based on annihilating Indians and India.

All said and done Tiger 3 is one of better masala movies of this year, we hardly had any this year.

Govind Nihalani’s Party (1984): A Rare Beast

It starts with a rousing monologue. The revolutionary soliloquy leaves no space for ambiguity as far as the ideology of the filmmaker is concerned. But yet, it contains enough to indicate that he is also capable of unbiased introspection.

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Prem Geet 3 (2022) Movie Review: Flatters to Deceive

What are the odds that a Nepali film would get released worldwide, including India? And what are the odds that the film would even get dubbed in Hindi and promoted reasonably well? Well, I was surprised to see that Prem Geet 3, the third film in the Prem Geet franchise (to be honest I had no clue of it’s existence until recently) has actually managed to do all of this and that too in a fairly impressive fashion. Hence, I was but curious to check it out for myself and figure out what’s working (if it is so) in it’s favour?Continue reading “Prem Geet 3 (2022) Movie Review: Flatters to Deceive”

Bheeshma Parvam (2022) Malayalam Movie Review: When The Mahabharata Meets Godfather

The Godfather as a movie has been inspiring filmmakers across the globe even today. In India there have been many variations of Godfather which have been made right from Feroz Khan’s stylish Dharmatma, to Mani Ratnam’s gritty Nayagan, to Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar. 

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KGF Chapter 2 (2022) Movie Review: A Tale of Men & Mines

Kannada industry is known for remaking films from other languages. In terms of creativity it is not on par with the Malayalam film industry in terms of output. Similarly it does not have the scale of Tamil or Telugu cinema to execute large scale entertainers. But then things are improving to an extent in the last few years. KGF Chapter 1 when released was a surprise hit outside Karnataka as well. This first film went head on head with Bollywood’s ZERO which featured SRK. The audience lapped up KGF Chapter 1 and rejected the same old romantic Bollywood films.

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BEAST (2022) Tamil Movie Review: Guns, Swag and Vijay in a Nelson world

Commercial cinema in India is a tricky issue, especially so in Tamil and Telugu where directors need to tread a path wherein they need to balance their storytelling and pander to fans. While Vijay has been consistently among the most popular stars in Tamil cinema, with a solid mass fan following, Nelson on the other hand is a director who is known for dark comedy, a genre which has not been explored much in Tamil cinema. I was looking forward for this combination, expecting something exciting to emerge out of it.

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RRR (2022) Telugu Movie Review: Andhra Extrrravaganza

RRR has been in the news since the time it was announced and rightly so as it is not everyday you see two superstars of Telugu industry coming together. Facing numerous delays due to the pandemic the film has finally hit the theatres today.

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Sooryavanshi (2021) Movie Review: This Needed More Masala

When the pandemic hit us last year, no one imagined that going back to the theatres will take a long time. My home state of Maharashtra had opened theatres in December 2020, only to close them again soon by early April 2021 due to the deadly second wave of Covid/China virus. Finally we are back on track and it is almost 18 months since I have watched a Hindi movie in a theatre. This was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

I decided to watch Sooryavanshi at a theatre near my home as the theatre had just opened 3 days before lockdown and was soon shutdown. Strangely during the pandemic I was consuming a lot of masala films and rewatching films which gave me comfort and gave a sense of poetic justice to me.

Sooryavanshi could not have come at a better time when one of the most celebrated cops in the country has been under scrutiny and there is a slugfest around him due to politics and an ex-commissioner is missing . thus the film comes at the right time when it gives us hope that Mumbai will bounce back and so will Mumbai Police.

Rohit Shetty started his career with the actioner Zameen which was a Bollywood take on Kandahar Hijack, but Rohit changed his tracks later and met with success due to his comedy films. As far as I know Rohit Shetty hasn’t worked again on original scripts (apart from Zameen) as most of his film have been adaptations of Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films but with his take on it.

Sooryavanshi to be fair in most parts is an original film but has strong shades of Thuppakki, with Akshay Kumar having featured in the Hindi version (Holiday) of the same. Now let us be honest, politics or subtlety is not a strong point of Rohit Shetty. This is where Rohit flatters the most.

Sooryavanshi starts with this idea where Pakistanis are marrying Hindus and waiting to carry of sinister plan against India. Love Jihad check. The film mentions that Bombay/Mumbai has been under attack since ’93 by Pakistani sponsored terrorists, which is true and also tells us that the hero had lost his parents due to the Bombay Blasts, the largest attack ever carried by terrorists pre 9/11.

We have Kabir Shroff (Javed Jaffrey) obviously an ode to one of Mumbai’s supercops, Rakesh Maria, who along with his team from Mumbai police solved the case within a record time. But strangely there is no mention of Bombay riots, it is as if the makers are scared to utter the incident or that they think that it did not affect millions of Mumbaikars. But then I guess this is now part of rewriting history.

Then for some reason the makers confuse ISIS with Pakistani terrorists and terrorism. This is followed by a mention of Padgha where these religious teacher is recruiting Indian Muslim youth to fight against the state, strangely we all know how the so called accused or perpetrators of crime were declared not guilty by the court but then I guess we need to toe the line of propaganda and our hero needs to deliver sermon on who is a good Muslim or bad Muslim.

Surprisingly the much touted helicopter scene is marred with bad vfx and compared to this I would still say the action sequence in 1994’s like in flms like Sab Se Bada Khiladi had much better aerial sequence.

Also Bollywood needs to stop remixing old songs, Tip Tip Barsa Pani is one of the worst picturised songs of late and it does not do any justice to the original and Katrina is nowhere near the league of Raveena. Also do not know why Katrina looks jaded in the movie.

In Singham and Simmba despite being alpha action movie, the lead female character had an objective to support hero here that is totally missing and in one scene it becomes misogynistic also when Sooryavanshi glances accusingly his wife when the security lapse was on the part of his team.

Now that we have done with the bad parts, let me come to the good parts. It emerges when Rohit Shetty stops taking himself seriously and goes full on Bollywood masala mode, beginning with the Hum Hindustani song and you know it is cheesy but that is the time when you start to enjoy the movie. From here on Rohit is in full control, bringing back Singham (Ajay Devgn) and Simmba (Ranveer Singh) to set up his cop universe.

This where we see Farhad Samji with their witty one liners like ” aa gaya Dev leke Gun”, wordplay reference to Ajay Devgn. From here on the film is irreverent with a bomb disposal scene which includes fun and tense moments in parts.

It is where the movie shines, when the focus is on Simmba and Singham and the action shifts to hand to hand combat and punchlines and boy it is what we missed about our movies, in the end hero saves the day.

Alas the last act comes tad too late, but it entertains.

Also a request, if you are watching this in a cinema hall, please follow the guidelines issued by local authorities and listen to the cinema ushers. They are doing their duty to keep a safe environment for you and other film buffs, show your vaccine certificate when asked, be seated in your allotted seats, keep your masks on and do not argue as to why you want to eat inside the theatre.

Be safe, stay safe and welcome back to the movies.

Palm Springs (2020) Movie Review: Old Fashioned Love in the New Age

Haven’t most of us wondered how lovely it would be if we could go back to an immediate past and in the process getting to alter something that we had done or got into earlier? Imagine if that were to happen and you end up making a difference to the event in the past. Now hang on, even before you manage to start rejoicing, you see the same thing happen again and again. You are transported into the recent past repeatedly, leaving you clueless of what is happening to you. Now is the pandemic making me go crazy? Or am I probably watching way too many sci-fi movies of late (now this is definitely true) and hence dreaming of a time machine? Oh! No, its nothing like that, though I wouldn’t say no to getting access to a time machine.

But after watching Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (directorial debut) it is difficult not to allow one’s thoughts to flow in such a direction. Having had its World Premiere at Sundance last year, the film went on to find a digital release on Hulu as well as a release in select drive-in cinemas in the U.S in July 2020. Winning a lot of critical acclaim, I was a bit intrigued about the film as not many rom-com’s of late have have received so much appreciation. On November 9 (the year is never referred to) in Palm Springs we get to attend Tala (Camila Mendes) and Abe’s (Tyler Hoechlin) destination wedding. In attendance at the wedding among others are Nyles (Adam Sandberg), his girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner) and Tala’s elder sister Sarah (Cristin Miloti). Nyles and Sarah get friendly and just as they are about to get intimate, Nyles is attacked by someone and gets injured. In an attempt to save himself Nyles crawls into a cave, followed by Sarah out of concern for him, despite his warning to stay away from the cave.

Sarah is sucked into a vortex, wakes up soon and finds herself back in the same day (November 9) and sees the same things happening to her again. On confronting Nyles whom she believes to be responsible for this, Sarah gets to know that she has now got stuck in an infinite time loop of sorts along with him. Yes, this isn’t the first-time loop-based movie, be it the iconic Groundhog Day or the more recent Edge of Tomorrow, this is a plot device that has been comfortably used by Hollywood filmmakers across various genres. Thus, it is to the credit of Max Barbakow and his co-writer Andy Siara that the writing has enough meat in it to keep the audience entertained all the way. Yes somewhere in between as we see a desperate Sarah and a casual Nyles go through various situations in trying to live the day differently, there’s this feeling of oh! what else is possible. But the film ensures that this just remains a passing thought in our minds (if at all) and not something that becomes a concern in any manner.

The proceedings are certainly spunky, the situations that Nyles and Sarah find themselves in are funny and inventive. The film makes light of the sci-fi aspect, for example the way reference to heavy duty subjects like quantum physics and general relativity is shown in a casual manner. Credit certainly to both Adam Sandberg and Cristin Miloti for the way they play Nyles and Sarah with an easygoing style and complimenting each other. Having spent so much time in the time loop it is not a surprise that Nyles would be bored or indifferent to the situation and Adam Sandberg brings out these traits in Nyles in an assured manner. Sarah on the other hand on realizing the situation that she is stuck in, doesn’t want to accept the situation and is desperate to break out, leading to various situations, hilarious and engrossing at the same time. Cristin Miloti brings out the necessary vulnerability and heft to the character.

The supporting cast is also effective, especially J.K.Simmons who has a blast portraying Roy and his scenes with Nyles are certainly a highlight. The arid locations of Palm Springs and the wild outdoors soon add a lot of depth to the proceedings, nearly assuming the status of a character. Eventually it is no surprise to find yourself looking at Sarah and Nyles’ time loop from an internal viewpoint (as perceived) and that by itself is a victory for the film, certainly no mean feat that Max Barbakow and his team have managed to achieve. The film is not just one with a heart, it is all about literally letting your heart celebrate the vagaries of love in an unexpected fashion.

With Hollywood films warming up to the scenario of theatrical release in India once again and with a steady flow of American films being seen in India (despite cinemas in Maharashtra and Kerala still remaining closed), over the last few weeks, it is good to see a small but largely entertaining film like Palm Springs also making its way to cinemas in India (released on 24th September). Contemplating a weekend movie date? Well now you know what to do.