Before Tiger 3, Salman Khan’s spy games began as a goofy love story

Salman Khan in Tiger 3 (Screen grab/YouTube/YRF)

What if, one day, a globe-trotting spy, who kills at will, falls in love with a spy from an enemy country, and the two decide to elope and settle down as just another husband and wife? Surely, it is a tongue-in-cheek concept. It’s a spy movie, but with a wink. It’s the traditional Hindi romantic film where two lovers’ families or communities hate each other, but spiced up with the spy genre’s spectacles. It is a little bit like the hit Hindi spy series The Family Man, highly regarded for its self-aware take on the usually self-serious spy genre.

That’s exactly how Salman Khan’s Tiger series, the larger Yash Raj Films’ Spy Universe, and the contemporary deluge of Indian spy films began. What I described above is the conceit of Kabir Khan’s 2012 film Ek Tha Tiger, in which Salman Khan is packaged as an Indian superspy, who has had enough of his demanding job, and just wants to relax with Katrina Kaif, away from the eyes of his employers.

But in case you can barely recall or haven’t watched Ek Tha Tiger, you will hardly believe that the contemporary Bollywood spy genre’s roots are so lighthearted when you watch the recently released teaser of Tiger 3. The Maneesh Sharma-directed third instalment of YRF’ Spy Universe will be out on November 10. The teaser has Avinash Singh Rathore AKA Tiger (Salman Khan) speaking into a mic from a secret base, growling his message to the country. He says he has served the country for 20 years without asking for anything in return until now. He asks the country to deliver his “character certificate” for he has been dubbed a “traitor”. The country should decide if he is a “gaddar” or a “deshbhakt”. The music is serious, the mood grim. The teaser ends with shots of Tiger gunning down men in military gear. Sundry explosions follow.

This entire brain-busting over patriot-or-not, good Muslim and bad Muslim, and Islamic terrorism, which has been a staple of the Bollywood spy genre for the last 10 years was spectacularly absent in Ek Tha Tiger. Yes, when Tiger and his Pakistani spy lover Zoya (Katrina Kaif) vanish together, there’s some chatter over whether Tiger has turned rogue, but the proceedings have a Tom-and-Jerry feel, where Tiger and Zoya keep fooling and outrunning their respective colleagues. There’s no serious bloodshed. There is no menacing dialogue or back-and-forth over ideologies. The film is, quite simply, a love story. In 2023, Ek Tha Tiger is simultaneously old-fashioned and feels fresh, as the average Indian spy film today comes packed with cumbersome philosophies about nationalism and whatnot.

What exactly shifted the vibe? In Ek Tha Tiger, RAW and ISI are introduced in a simple, Wikipedia summary-like voiceover. It’s really cute. There indeed was a time when what is a spy and what is RAW or ISI needed to be explained to the Indian audience. And because of that innocence, perhaps, director Kabir Khan and his co-writer Neelesh Misra could take a genre that is famously American and give a warm desi touch to it.

Indian spy films before ‘Tiger’

Ultimately, what is the spy genre all about? An intelligence agent from a country goes on missions to various countries to eliminate enemies of the nation. Because the world’s most active and notorious spy agencies have been American, British, Israeli and Russian, naturally, most existing spy literature and cinema deal with CIA, MI6, Mossad and KGB. With Hollywood having monstrous budgets, they pretty much have had a monopoly on the spy genre. While the CIA would keep sending its agents to the Third World, destabilizing democratic governments, or fighting Communists, Hollywood would package these exploits as stories of heroic spies travelling the world, fighting global enemies intent on turning the planet (mostly, America) to dust.

Now, India’s RAW didn’t really have a global reputation for being an aggressive nation conducting operations on foreign soil for the longest time. (That has changed now, of course, with stories of India’s 2016 strike against militants in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and the assassination of Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, allegedly an Indian operation.) So, we did not quite need spy films. You did have the occasional spy film, which would be very pulpy stories buttressed with song and dance, the usual, like the 1966 Telugu film Gudachari 116, remade in Hindi as the hit Farz (1967). But in terms of production design, stunts, and just a general seriousness in world-building, these films could hardly be called spy films, if we consider James Bond or John le Carre’s novels as benchmark.

A couple of attempts to Hollywoodize the Indian spy film happened in the early 2000s. First came 16 December (2002). The film pivoted around India-Pakistan tensions, had a sense of history about it, and the villain was a Pakistani army officer. The next year, came Gadar and Gadar 2 director Anil Sharma’s The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003). It was a ghee-soaked melodrama about an Indian spy, played by Sunny Deol, fighting Pakistani spies and terrorists, while caught in a love triangle with an Indian and a Pakistani. Both films were produced, shortly after the Kargil War, and while the first NDA government was in power. But neither film became successful enough to encourage everyone to attempt spy films.

We wouldn’t have any serious attempt in Indian films in this genre until 2012-13 when we got, in order of release date: Agent Vinod and Ek Tha Tiger in Hindi; Vishwaroopam in Tamil; and D-Day in Hindi. Again, note, that these films were a reaction to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The depiction of nationalism, cross-border terrorism, and Islamic militancy became robust and sharper.

Of these four films, Ek Tha Tiger was a mammoth blockbuster, making over Rs 334 crore at the box office globally. Strangely, the army of Indian spy films that followed (Baby, Phantom, War, and innumerable others after the second NDA government came to power) eschewed its fun flavour and doubled down on the grave hypernationalistic tone of Vishwaroopam, D-Day, Phantom, and Baby.

The shift in the ‘Tiger’ series

Perhaps, this changed the tone of the second Tiger film, Tiger Zinda Hai (2017). Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger dealt with the entire matter of spies as something real, but not too serious for us to get bothered about an Indian spy disappearing with his Pakistani counterpart. The film also came with excellently choreographed action sequences (parkour moves, for one) that undoubtedly inspired the rest of Bollywood to do better. The film’s first-half, where the spies are falling in love, has very classical wooing scenes going on, something that has entirely disappeared now, with no one having a clue about how to make a romantic comedy. The screenplay, besides being loaded with humour, also has surprising twists and turns, a lot like a classic Vijay Anand caper.

In Tiger Zinda Hai, none of this exists. The villains are a ISIS-inspired Islamic terrorist outfit in the Middle East. Within the first five minutes, the primary villain lectures a captured American citizen about “imperialism”, bringing up American funding of militants to settle scores in the religion. The man is then stripped, his head shaved, and then beheaded. That sets the tone of the film. A serious atmosphere of danger and violence begins.

Katrina Kaif, who got to look like a dream in Ek Tha Tiger, barely throwing a punch, has her face bruised and bloodied here. In her introductory scene, she beats up some thieves in a store. The store owner calls this “women empowerment”. There is a scene about an Indian spy being belligerent towards his colleague, a Muslim, over his religion, until, of course, the Muslim spy proves he is a perfect patriot. The good guys are infallible, their mission will obviously succeed. Surprise and charm go out of the window. In comes Rambo-style action and geopolitics for dummies. Tiger Zinda Hai was a mega-hit, too, with Rs 570 crore in worldwide box office collections.

And now, we have Tiger 3. In between, we have had multiple jingoistic spy films, a bunch starring Akshay Kumar and John Abraham. Cub stars like Tiger Shroff and Aditya Roy Kapoor have had a few. In Pathaan, some of that spark from Ek Tha Tiger returned because Shah Rukh Khan’s famously breezy and witty screen image will obviously motivate the filmmakers to infuse some smarts into the screenplay. How did this makeover of the Indian spy film happen? The answer is blowing in the wind.