Child's play: "Sitaare Zameen Par"

Aamir Khan's recent choices are as prominent an illustration as any of the Hindi mainstream's increasing dependency on pre-tested material. 2017's musical Secret Superstar was constructed from familiar storybeats, but elevated by the strength and sincerity of its performances; yet 2022's Laal Singh Chaddha emerged as hamstrung by its fealty to its source material, Robert Zemeckis's ever-contentious Forrest Gump. Now Khan gives us Sitaare Zameen Par, a "spiritual" (i.e. more or less completely unconnected) sequel to his 2007 success Taare Zameen Par. The new film starts from a far less illustrious blueprint, being a remake of 2018's Campeones, the Spanish comedy-drama that's already been remade by Hollywood as 2023's Farrelly-directed Woody Harrelson vehicle Champions. Khan's Gulshan, an assistant coach for a Delhi basketball team, walks into shot playing the asshole, turning up late and unshaven for a key game and parking where he shouldn't, even before he thumps a superior and drunk-drives into a police patrol car. Community service and an attitude adjustment beckon: at his hearing, Gulshan is assigned to manage a squad of young ballers with special educational needs, the "superstars on earth" of the title. You will sense what's going to happen long before these plot points line up in exactly the order you'd expect; if R.S. Prasanna's film makes for a smoother, slicker, better-drilled adaptation than the staccato Laal Singh Chaddha, it's doubtless because this story has literally been told twice before, and spiritually revisited many more times besides.

On the plus side, SZP confirms its producer-star's nose for non-toxic material, for characterisations that are appreciably human rather than the superhuman figures namesake Salman Khan has been struggling to convince as, and for projects offering the prospect of chuckles. Chuckles there are here, on the subject of terminology (while shrugging off their own labels, the lads decide upon "businesswoman" as a synonym for sex worker), and at the sight of the pint-sized Khan being dwarfed by the absolute hulks among his charges. The star, passing into middle age with a lived-in, Jude Law-ish handsomeness, remains game for a laugh; a recent divorcee, he even works in some metatextual business involving Gulshan's gradual renegotiation of his relationship with ex-wife Sunita (Genelia Deshmukh, sparkier than a lot of recent Hindi heroines). The movie is aggressively unobjectionable: it's become the box-office hit it was always intended to be, and which Khan perhaps needed after a rocky Covid era. Yet it's only been ten years since P.K., a major Khan hit that took creative and satirical risks, where SZP goes genially through the motions. Unwilling to train his neurodivergent performers to dunk like Shaquille, Prasanna is never particularly interested in basketball as a sport, which means any in-game drama has had to be conveyed by cutaways to the sidelines. You could also duck out of the cinema for a meal during the entire central stretch, which doesn't trade in scenes so much as gentle lessons on the theme of "everybody has their own normal", put across in the same tone as an elementary teacher and in the same colours used to sell multivitamins to pre-teens. (The Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs play like nursery rhymes and lullabies.) In those stretches that aren't blandly entertaining, you spy the predicament of a megastar in an industry that's been set on a war footing even before India went to war. (Gulshan's community service comes to seem like a form of conscientious objection.) Rather than bang a nationalist drum, Khan has retreated to a gym that resembles a crèche to coach a sport that suggests war without the casualties. It's the very definition of a safe space, for star and audience alike, but there's not much more to the film than that - and set against the memory of Khan's epic and stirring Lagaan, a sports movie from a bolder, more confident era of Hindi filmmaking, it can't help but seem like kids' stuff.

Sitaare Zameen Par is now playing in selected cinemas.