Sultan. Review on Sultan

There’s a moment somewhere in the beginning of the film when Salman Khan’s character comes to a halt at a rail crossing, and waits, just like the rest of us do, for the train to pass.

In that instant we know that Sultan is about to push twin boundaries. Of a star’s scope, and of mainstream Bollywood. That this will not be the super-human, super-hero Bhai who has been shown crossing the tracks just a whisker ahead of a rushing locomotive from one of his several forgettable flicks. That this will be a Khan who has to, literally, do a lot of heavy-lifting to win the crown.

And win it he does. ‘Sultan’ has him breaking free from Bhai-giri bondage by getting his character to crack and bleed. His down-and-out wrestler has foibles, is fallible, is human. Sultan Ali Khan has faults, and is punished for it. Because of which Sultan scores, and delivers a solid entertainer with heft.

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Sultan, sultan review, Anushka Sharma, sultan movie, sultan anushka image Sultan review: Salman Khan doesn’t miss a beat in Sultan as he is ably supported by film’s lead actress Anushka Sharma.

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It isn’t as if Sultan doesn’t struggle with its profusion of familiar tropes. There’s your underdog-to-champion, in which child-like Jat Sultan is shown starting from nothing, becoming a world champion in no time at all(yes, there is some sweat and tears involved in the training, but not too much, because hey, this is Bollywood). There’s a romance which involves risible songs and dialogue( ‘Baby ko bass pasand hai’, with a shift-and-lift-of-male-and-female derriers). But the girl in question, played by Anushka Sharma with sparkle, is a wrestler herself. She is a woman with ambition, and she’s made to talk of uplifting ‘mothers’ and ‘sisters’ in patriarchal Jatland.

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There’s the meteoric rise and fall-by-arrogance, but enough time is taken for us to register the downswing of our hero, even as we know that the upswing is just a few frames away. There’s the cynical trainer(Randeep Hooda) who keeps chomping on food items, and who will, we know, help slap our out-of-shape, overweight wrestler into shape. This one is the most Hollywood of them all, reminding us of all similar trainers. Remember Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby?

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But director Ali Abbas Zafar surprises us by keeping the slack moments mostly at bay in this 170-minutes enterprise. Some lines are distinctly populist, but spry enough to make you crack up: Hooda has a lovely one about ‘asli Jats’. The supporting cast injects freshness, with the reliable Mishra as the ‘akhara-owner’ and father of Anushka, who wants his daughter to go places. Amit Sadh plays it nicely as the owner of an Indian pro-Mixed Martial Arts team, even if he owns a trope of his own: never say die. And the hero’s best friend, one of the oldest tropes in the book, is a new face(Anant Sharma) who does the Haryanvi accent to a T.

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