Bharat
Year: 2019
Director: Ali Abbas Zafar
Cast: Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Sunil Grover, Jackie Shroff, Sonali Kulkarni

“How can you even watch a Salman Khan-movie?” There are many friends and folks, who often ask me this question in exasperation. I get their point. What they are trying to say is how someone could watch an average actor in a manipulative masala movie!

There is one simple answer. I do that because I enjoy watching his antics in such overdone mass-entertainers. To me Sallu-bhai is the only star in the post-Bachchan era to nonchalantly pull a totally ridiculous, unbelievable piece of cinema to box-office success . No acting chops here, just cool charisma!

What's the plot?

Director Ali Abbas Zafar (Sultan, Tiger Zinda Hai) knows well how to project Salman and in Bharat, he milks the star's popular image to the max. The story dishes out a rather overloaded mix of patriotism, cross-border fraternity, family values, friendship, romance and sacrifice, where Sallu’s titular character goes from a post-Partition-refugee to a circus performer to a Gulf oil well-worker to a Merchant Navy shipmate to a septuagenarian shop-owner. His life-story is intertwined with different phases of post-Independence Indian history. It is a plot where history, logic and melodrama are stretched to the maximum.

Verdict

What saves Bharat from being a washout like Tubelight is its fun and frolic quotient. Despite its soapy, sanitized, stretched storyline, Bharat keeps the things lighthearted and interesting. Katrina Kaif (who bagged the heroine’s role after Priyanka left the film in the lurch in the ‘Nick’ of time!), Sunil Grover (playing Salman’s all-weather friend), Satish Kaushik (as a staccato-speaking ship-captain) and an African actor (playing a Somali pirate) all contribute healthily in this regard. There are enough ‘items’ to keep all sections of audience happy.

But what really makes this potentially tiresome (and sometimes tedious!) tale engaging is its leading man. Within his limitations (and giving two hoots about them!) the ageing Salman effortlessly goes through the comedy-romance-action-emotion-song-dance routines. He enjoys doing that all-in-one starry stuff and passes off that enjoyment to the audience. Put any other actor in his place and the film would fall flat on its face!

Watching Bharat is a throwback to the good old Big B-Manmohan Desai-Prakash Mehra years. It is about experiencing the pull of raw star-power and Bollywood’s eternal Action-Emotion-Drama formula! Don’t bother watching it if you can’t digest such things; there millions who do it happily and they are already making this film yet another box-office winner!

Rating

3 stars