In Atlee’s Jawan, Shah Rukh Khan dons several looks, makes about a dozen slow-motion entries into the frame, mans a woman’s prison he also uses as a front for a vigilante operation and near about defies age and logic, in not one, but two roles. None of the exacerbating silliness of it all matters, however, because this is Shah Rukh Khan reclaiming his throne, from where he delivers not just masala but also message. Khan has been pedestaled by mainstream Hindi cinema before, as its totemic charmer, the man with the widest embrace and the softest gaze. A man who has both defined and classified for us, the language of love. Jawan, though, channels his stardom into a profuse, exhilarating star-vehicle that literally and figuratively, takes the roof off this thing we call storytelling. This is cinema at is confounding, entertaining best.
Khan plays Azaad, the jailor of a women’s prison facility who also moonlights as a vigilante extracting justice on behalf of those who cannot. He hijacks trains, kidnaps ministers and disseminates kindness and favour in a way no version of bureaucracy tasked to do so ever has. It’s a fairly simple plot, reminiscent of several genre films that centralize both trauma and disenchantment. Azaad is supported by a team of six women, each a prisoner of the law, each undone by its incentivized redressal system. Corruption, greed and decadence form the backdrop to this story that goes from vigilante justice to personal revenge in fairly unsubtle ways. Sequences can at times feel rushed, transitions often abrupt and lean to be able to separate the gloss from the glue. None of it matters, however, once Khan walks onto the screen, with a demeanour that seems mindful of his own ecstatic aura. “Ye Mufasa hai,” a supporting character disclaims about him at one point. He is not wrong.
Azaad’s father, Vikram Rathore, is a senior version of Khan, perhaps the most wicked thing he has been in a long long time. He smokes cigars, pummels men nonchalantly, and is at his dazzling finest when he can’t quite figure the emotional heft of everything that is happening around him. Opposite Azaad (and Rathore), is Kaali, played by the excellent Vijay Sethupathi, a weapons dealer with a personal connection to Rathore. He’s vile, putrid and corny in the best ways possible. In one scene, after he is hit by Khan, he mimes pain, unstiffening his back for comedic effect. It’s delightful in an unrehearsed way and feels like the perfect foil for two men sparring, well past their physical primes. Adding to this entertaining duo is Nayanthara, a slick, seductive IPS officer on Azaad’s tail.
There are some obvious flaws to Jawan’s flamboyance. The story, though anchored by personal and socio-political trauma, can’t quite sentimentalize the cause beyond putting together the puzzle pieces. The flashbacks work to an extent, but also feel like fill-ins for character sketches that, owing to the hypnotic action sequences, practically get written out of the film.
Moreover, Azaad’s flirtations with Nayanthara’s character, their relationship is hastened to look like an ill-fitting brick in a solid, irrepressible wall of elegant machismo. There is a grace to Khan’s virility, a kind of fluffiness to even his most violent onscreen self yet. For once, in fact, Khan’s romantic avatar feels like it is getting in the way of the enduring action star he has in 2023 become. A star that feels like the coming together of tact and tenacity, providence that practically combs through the aisles of a beaming theatre, with a surreal air of invincibility. Hindi cinema has probably not seen anything like this before. Pathaan was great. This delivers to the king, a brand new kingdom.
Also read: Before Bollywood debut opposite SRK in Jawan, how Nayanthara blazed a path to superstardom
It’s probably nit-picking to tell you that not all of that romantic hustling that Khan was known for, works on screen anymore. Neither does some of the music, the rather mushy montages that strain the film’s tension at the expense of its most sacred thing – a prognostic self-seriousness. Atlee contextualiszes the politics of our times, and rolls it into an intimate story that feel as much a fable, as it does a pledge. Azaad does what he does because he, like so many others, has been wronged. And though the simplicity of his methods can look far too juvenile and crowded by unnecessary twists by the end, it packs an epochal punch. Cinema can’t exact change, but it can as Jawan shows, extrapolate for the unmotivated, and the uninformed alike, the wounds that a bleeding republic makes.
Everything you probably think Jawan would be is bettered by a storyline and an act that is so singularly arresting, it feels like the christening moment of a not-too-distant demi-god. Maybe this is what cinema is actually made for. To craft lustrating experiences that feel so cathartic on a molecular level, that unnerve you to the point that the story you are watching as opposed to the one you are living, becomes your only faithful way of reading the world around you. Reality, outside the theatre is obviously different but inside it, the forest of imagination and thought is abloom with the light of ideas, the exuberance of a wilderness without limits. Not everyone gets to see this forest. Fewer still get to live through it. And maybe just one, gets to actually rule it. Sometimes he is Pathaan, sometimes he is Jawan.
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