Chasing January’s crowdpleasing comeback Pathaan, here’s further confirmation of Shah Rukh Khan’s status as reigning, benevolent King of Bollywood. Where his earlier film expounded on established formula, Khan’s latest stretches its arms wider and demonstrates flickers of idiosyncratic vision. It is properly pan-Indian: the emergent Tamil action stylist Atlee imports South Indian cinema’s characteristic rowdiness and social conscience, alerting the mass audience to pressing regional concerns – before apparently losing control over his material. A star vehicle that functions like a runaway train, Jawan covers a lot of ground in surprising fashion at full throttle – but that’s also a polite way of admitting it’s utterly all over the place.
Its surest organising principle is its lead actor, shuffling knowingly and wittily through a range of personas. From his opening line (“who am I?”), Khan draws us into wondering what relation the bandaged warrior liberating a village in a prologue has to the gruff baldie laying siege to Mumbai’s metro, and the prison warden clinging to a second chance at love. A one-man Cloud Atlas, Jawan is a puzzle movie where the star proves the puzzle; it’s a great showcase for Khan to play everything under the sun: godly badass, dandyish army vet, total sweetheart with a prospective stepdaughter. There’s ego involved, undeniably, but few stars in any cinema could model such radically diverse hats with this much flair.
Less smooth are the moving parts around him, a whirlwind of ideas good, bad and flagrantly pilfered that suggests this project would have benefited from one script editor for every five Shah Rukhs. Atlee maintains a frenzied momentum, but he has to, lest we pause to consider the preposterous tosh this plot keeps pushing our way. Once our hero’s genesis is resolved, we’re left with another headscratcher: how a movie that features cinema’s lamest Matrix and Christopher Nolan allusions could also generate a tremendous stretch of highway-bound carnage, as thrilling as anything could Hollywood manage. Jawan will prove no more enduring than Pathaan in the Khan pantheon, but it’s a semi-fascinating display of star power, and a rollicking (if bumpy) Friday-night ride.
• Jawan is released on 7 September in cinemas.
