Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan: Salman Khan-Starrer Induces Lungi Blah-nch

THERE ARE SOME THINGS you don’t expect from a Salman Khan film: a basic storyline, plot development, laws of physics, principles of biology, and (even) a cursory acknowledgement of women as people. Not for nothing has the actor, over several decades now, played a human-sized cardboard cutout, fought off 30 people at one go, danced with a towel between his legs and cracked a wide range of offensive jokes. I’d argue, the sooner you accept it, the better. The 57-year-old is in no mood to change, having openly expressed similar feelings. Besides, look at it as self-preservation: If you watch a Salman Khan film with zero expectations, there is no way it can break you, right? Right? Wrong.

On a hot Friday morning, I woke up to watch Khan’s latest film. The alarm went off at 7.30 and like a prayer, I gave myself a pep talk. “Remember, you are not weak. He can’t do anything to you.” So far so good. Thirty minutes later I was sitting in the darkness of the theater, wildly hoping for a divine intervention — like a nation-wide electricity outage, for the projector to stop functioning, or the multiplex to crumble to the ground — to escape what had befallen me. Here I was, sitting on a chair, but mentally begging for Khan to stop. Dear Reader, this is when I must admit that despite making peace with every anticipated narrative flaw, Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan broke me.

I don’t recall the exact moment when my spirit left my body. It might have been at the scene when Salman’s jacket enters the frame before he does and the actor chooses to wear it mid-air. It could also be the time when the names of his brothers are revealed to be Pyaar, Ishq and Mo(habbat) who are in love with women called Muskaan, Chahaat and Sukoon. I fear the sight of Khan doing leg day in the guise of dancing might have caused my end. Or, that my sanity was disrupted when his character — excited to marry a girl visibly half his age — sings a song about cats. In the ​​puritanical world of Salman Khan films, invoking this particular animal in a wedding song will be the closest he will come to talking about sex. But I digress.

Farhad Samji’s Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan, a remake of the 2014 Tamil film Veeram, is so bafflingly unhinged, so absolutely unnecessary and so perplexingly bad that watching it will make someone — anyone; everyone — uncomfortably numb. The story goes something like this: Khan stars as the ‘bhai’ and ‘jaan’. He has no family, no religion, no name and no profession. All he has are three (adopted) brothers and a head full of hair (arguably the best performer in the film). Many years ago, he had decided not to marry to safeguard the peace of the household. Because, as wisely surmised, 99.9 percent women are nice but if someone from that 0.1 percent enters his house, she might affect their brotherly bond (you can take Khan’s film out of patriarchy but you cannot take patriarchy out of his films). This puts pressure on his useless brothers to reluctantly follow suit, even though their favourite pastime is hiding things from their bhai. To bypass this, they decide to find a ‘jaan’ for him.

Given how Khan’s bachelor status continues to have the nation in a chokehold, the plot inflections (there are two) are mined from his persona. In the film, his first girlfriend, called Bhagya, is revealed to be actress Bhagyashree. She appears with real-life husband Himalaya Dasani and son Abhimanyu, and sweetly tells her former paramour that she has moved on. This signals the entry of another girl of the same name (Pooja Hegde) in their neighbourhood. She might be decades younger than him but his bright-bulb brothers coax their bhai to fall for her. Bhagyalaxmi appears willing from the word go and after flirting over some verses from the Bhagavad Gita, so does he. Have patience, there is more. She hails from Hyderabad and her elder brother (Venkatesh) appears to be everything bhai jaan is not. By which I mean the former has a job, a name, shorter hair and is non-violent. 

But Khan’s films cannot be bereft of violence as that would require him to act. So, a fresh set of villains are introduced (Jagapathi Babu leading the pack). Oh, there is also another MLA (boxer Vijender Singh making his debut) back in Delhi who wants to kill the brothers to take over the area they live in (trust grown-up men to fight over a poorly designed set). In this wide circus of adjective dressed characters, it is only the ever-dependable Abhimanyu Singh who shows some moral complexity — he plays a hired goon who shifts his allegiance, twice.

It would be futile to say things like Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan has no sense of rhythm, no style, no plot, no continuation. These are given and perhaps even mandated. But what really troubles me is the confidence of the makers to put something like this out for consumption with their names on it, knowing fully well this will be part of his legacy; it’s worrying that Khan has not just stopped trying but has even stopped trying to try. Worrying too, that Shehnaaz Gill, Palak Tiwari, Raghav Juyal, Siddharth Nigam, Jassie Gill and Vinali Bhatnagar — with sizeable social media clout of their own — agreed to star in a film which is only interested in using their faces for reaction shots. And sadly, this will probably mark late actor Satish Kaushik’s last performance on screen. Which reminds me of the exact moment the film ended me — now, while writing 900 words on it.