The fourth film in the YRF Spy Universe, the Shah Rukh Khan star vehicle Pathaan is beautiful, alluring, and full of excellent high-octane action sequences performed by beautiful people and supplemented with stupendous special effects. It’s Bollywood’s best answer to Mission Impossible. But it is also a menacing and even sinister film.
The problem isn’t that the film is inspired by disagreeable or even offensive politics, though these are accusations that probably could hold up in any reasonable court of law. The problem is the film’s protagonist is so thoroughly de-personified that he’s little more than an unforgiving, blank slate for jingoism, incapable of being a normal human. Pathaan imagines a world in which the still-brainwashed Bucky, rather than Steve Rogers, were the true Captain America—or, Captain India.
For all of its beauty and action-packed fun, Pathaan is a vicious, vitriolic film that needs to be warded off for those just seeking a night of dumb fun. Initiating from the real-world 2019 abrogation of the Indian Article 370—which granted Kashmir a separate constitution—a Pakistani general hires contract terrorist and former Indian intelligence (RAW) agent Jim (John Abraham) to bring India to its knees. Yes, the affliction of pointless suffering seems to be the political objective here, rather than an assertion of regional autonomy or anything along those lines—those ideas are too dangerous to put in the minds of regular civilians, so straw-man terrorist it is. The general recognizes that Jim, a man whose pregnant wife was murdered by terrorists who the Indian government refused to negotiate with despite his panicked pleading, is the perfect agent of the conspiracy: he’s willing and capable of doing the impossible to realize revenge.
Shah Rukh Khan, the king of the Indian box office, plays the titular Pathaan, whose name signals a Muslim majority ethnic sub-group… though he basically forsakes his religion for nationalism and admits he doesn’t know if he’s Muslim anymore. (Interestingly enough, Khan became the biggest star in the country despite being Muslim himself.) He recruits Rubina Mohsin (Deepika Padukone), an ex-Pakistani intelligence agent, to hopefully subdue Jim’s blind vengeance.
Other than the distracting action, Padukone is the film’s only bright spot. In the 2.5-hour runtime, her revolving wardrobe delivers a selection as diverse and flattering as the entirety of Milla Jovovich’s closet in the six Resident Evil films. Shaleena Nathani, Padukone and Khan’s personal costume designer, deserves all credit. Khan and Abraham impress here too—with changes in outfits necessitated by the film’s eight different international locations—but Padukone at least looks like she’s having fun, even if her suits are predictably impractical for a female super-spy. The film’s other two big bills look like they have better places to be, especially Khan, who gives arguably the most phoned-in performance that I’ve ever seen from him.
But even Padukone, who is her usual sensational self, can’t save Siddharth Anand’s film. It’s long past saving. Rather than a rogue agent fighting against his own state (albeit in a pacified democratic sense) à la Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible series, Pathaan is a weapon of the state, hardly distinguishable from any actual disposable mechanical weapon. He’s basically a traveling macguffin, bouncing around from one country to the next in pursuit of Jim. His personality trait (since, you know, each character can only really have one) is nothing more than fetishistic nationalism. Like Marvel’s Bucky, he’s essentially brainwashed. Unlike Bucky, we’re apparently supposed to think that’s a good thing.
At the film’s climactic clash between Pathaan and Jim, rather than a complex emotional reckoning that the two of them could have easily traded places, something Jim teases earlier, the super-soldier reasserts Pathaan’s moral superiority over the pathetic Jim, who couldn’t save his own wife. I’m not even shitting you, as Pathaan murders the ex-RAW agent that could have easily been him, he utters an altered version of that damned JFK maxim: “A soldier does not ask what his country can do for him; he asks what he can do for this country,” as if asking your country to stop terrorists from murdering your pregnant wife is somehow unpatriotic. It’s a twisted moment that flows directly from twisted politics.
If Pathaan is Khan’s attempt to solidify his image as a patriot, he managed to do so—as long as patriotism is nothing more than cruel, whitewashing allegiance.
Pathaan
2023
dir. Siddharth Anand
146 min.
In theaters now, if you must!