Tubelight **
Dir: Kabir Khan. With: Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Om Puri, Zhu
Zhu. 157 mins. Cert: 12A
Three years ago, few could have predicted that Salman Khan –
Bollywood’s somewhat incredible hulk, then mired in career controversy – would
eventually devote himself to issuing filmed humanitarian statements. This
curious turn into mid-career community service began with 2015’s summer megahit
Bajrangi Bhaijaan, in which the star
sought to build bridges between India and Pakistan; it continued through last
year’s biopic Sultan, where an ageing
action man pondered how best to use his muscle. In new release Tubelight, the charm offensive
stutters: with its pitifully glib pleas for peace, this 1960s-set mushfest
makes Culture Club’s low-barring “The War Song” sound as though it was written
by AJP Taylor.
The unlikely source is Little
Boy, 2015’s Emily Watson/Kevin James farrago, although UK viewers may be
haunted by lingering traces of a similarly titled Rolf Harris number. Khan’s
pea-brained yet broad-shouldered Laxman gains the nickname Tubelight after
fluorescent strip lighting reaches his mountaintop village: a dim bulb, he’s
considered slow to spark into life. His younger sibling is Bharat (Sohail
Khan), hale and heartier, and therefore among the first to be drafted when
tensions escalate along the Indo-Chinese border. Thus are our boys torn
asunder: wide-eyed Laxman left at home blinking and worrying, while Bharat
endures dusty battle scenes, time in a POW camp, and a general sense of
innocence being lost.
Some of this innocence could well do with getting lost. The
sight of the now-fiftysomething Salman playing the teenage Laxman is
unignorably ridiculous: with his tanktop, slicked-down hair and worried
grimaces, his flies forever undone by way of a vaguely disturbing running gag,
the historical figure he most resembles is Ricky Gervais as Derek. Then again,
Laxman’s entire journey feels both forced and familiar. As he overcomes local
suspicions to befriend the young son of a Chinese refugee, Salman and director
Kabir Khan appear to be directly replaying Bajrangi,
albeit with a child performer who’d have fared markedly better being left in
their trailer to get on with any homework.
The spin would be that this is big-hearted Salman reaching out
and making friends with that emergent Chinese audience who, as their
considerable contributions to Dangal’s
global box-office recently illustrated, are embracing Bollywood in their
millions. Yet olive branches lose their symbolic worth when they come with a
price tag attached. Bajrangi’s
sentiment was to some degree sincere, which is why it left us – against our
rational instincts – blubbering in the aisles; here, it’s thin syrup drizzled
over a cold-eyed business proposition, one as calculated as any of those
Western blockbusters who’ve taken to shooting cutaways of Fan Bingbing in the
hope of making off with a little extra yuan.
Flickers of a more warming experience persist. Despite a
tinkly incidental score shamelessly plundering “Baby Face” for its leitmotif,
the songs are someway stronger than the dialogue; the late Om Puri adds clout
as a village elder, and Shah Rukh Khan enjoys a nimble cameo as a travelling
magician. Yet everyone’s deferring to a producer-star whose saviour complex
looms heavy over every frame. These past few years have seen Salman becoming
smarter about his public persona – Laxman literally strives to move mountains
to bring people together – but without the tears that might soften our vision,
all Tubelight resembles is a
rebranding process: somewhere between act of vanity and lamentable waste of
energy.
Tubelight is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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