Crash, bang, boo

need to pitch him against an armada of three-eyed aliens, at the very least.

The film might have made sense if Tiger’s superhuman strength came from a scientist’s test tube or because he was a ‘genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist’ and vigilante in his spare time.

As it is, Tiger’s wins come from the fact that director Ahmed Khan cares about action to the exclusion of all else. The story itself is creaky with age — in the city of Agra, a young man named Ronnie (Tiger) promises to always take care of his older but more timid sibling, Vikram (Riteish Deshmukh). He then pushes Vikram to become a police inspector. Ronnie does all the heavy lifting; Vikram just turns up to accept the medals.

As they clean up their city, they fall foul of a local gang led by a criminal named IPL (Jaideep Ahlawat) with links to an Isis-like organisation from Syria called Jaish-elashkar. Vikram is then sent off to extradite IPL from

Syria, where he is now based, but he is kidnapped, forcing Ronnie to cut a swathe through that country.

Forget geopolitics, Baaghi doesn’t even concern itself with common sense.

There might be an army pursuing Ronnie, but they would rather be killed than shoot first. Vijay Verma’s Pakistani character gets his accent from Hyderabad. IPL stands for Inder Paheli Lamba, and he likes to toss out riddles at random; Satish Kaushik’s police commissioner is called BMC aka Bhookelal Moohpe Chatore – you get the picture. Even the dialogue is full of parivaar and pyaar and feels at least 30 years too old.

Tiger remains limited in emotional scenes; Shraddha Kapoor is given little to do other than be perky before the interval and tanned after. Riteish’s namby-pamby act gets repetitive really fast, and Varma and Ahlawat seem happy to sleepwalk through their roles.

It’s this for a mind-numbing 140 minutes; thankfully Tiger is kicking and punching through most of it.