Director: Farhad Samji
Writers: Farhad Samji, Sparsh Khetarpal, Tasha Bhambra
Cast: Salman Khan, Pooja Hegde, Venkatesh, Jagapathi Babu
When ChatGPT renders Bollywood screenwriters jobless in the near future, they will form a union to sue artificial intelligence (AI). The high-profile case will be covered by AI-operated cameras and holograms of reporters. Elon Musk will tweet about it. In court, when a lawyer asks the writers if they remember the exact moment they realized that a machine is capable of replacing them, the answer would be unanimous: The release of Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan in 2023. That fateful April weekend is when they knew that storytelling and film-making didn’t need to be done by humans anymore. The judge will ask for audiovisual evidence. Dramatically, the footage of Salman Khan dancing, moving and speaking will appear on a screen that emerges out of thin air. And the prosecution lawyer will then summon a film critic to explain the algorithmic atrocity that is Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. The testimony would be vivid, furious and go as follows.
It’s Eid. Director Farhad Samji decides to present superstar Salman Khan’s wishes to his diehard fans in the form of a Hindi movie. He rightfully deduces that it might look more personalized than pasting the actor’s video message on the big screen. What sort of movie, you ask? Following the mega success of Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback in Pathaan, the idea is to make Salman Khan’s Pathaan: A self-reverential ode disguised as an action entertainer. The 2014 Tamil hit Veeram is recalibrated beyond recognition to achieve this. So Salman Khan stars as a fictional version of himself. He is a nameless and orphaned hero, fondly known as Bhaijaan, who has allegedly stayed a bachelor for the sake of his three younger brothers called Love, Ishq and Moh. He swears by violence. His religion, like Pathaan, is ambivalent – his brothers pray to Jesus Christ, and he recites verses from the Bhagavad Gita to impress a girl. The point is that this maybe-Muslim legend brought his brothers up single-handedly, and not unlike a defunct Narayan Shankar from Mohabbatein(2000), insists that no woman is ever allowed to tear the brothers apart. Romance is the enemy. Once the three kids fall in love (the feeling, not the brother), the six millennials decide to find mighty Bhaijaan a bride so that everyone can get married together. Enter Bhagya (Pooja Hegde), the new girl in a Delhi locality that looks like Rohit Shetty’s iteration of Khan Market. Bhaijaan finds his Jaan, and the second half features his family meeting her peace-loving family in Hyderabad. Which got me thinking: What if Raj Aryan had set up grumpy Narayan Shankar with Helen’s Miss Monica? Wouldn’t Gurukul have been cooler?
