Unsettling experience
Salman Khan is back as the fictional cop Chulbul Pandey, who beats, maims and slaps criminals, subordinates and members of the public. In Dabangg 3, he acquires a tragic backstory too.
Directed by Prabhudeva, who has swiftly become Khan’s go-to director for whenever he wishes to do as he pleases, the film introduces us to Khushi (Saiee Manjrekar), Chulbul’s sweetheart before Sonakshi Sinha’s Rajjo. Khushi is a pretty, sweet sacrificial lamb. When the timing is right, she joins a long list of WAGs sacrificed at the altar of clichéd plots, so that the hero can be given a semblance of depth.
And then, despite the sacrificial lamb and the generic item number, Dabangg takes a turn towards wokeness. Chulbul is no longer threatening to smack women across the face, but rescuing them from sex traffickers and encouraging them to keep their names intact after marriage.
He’s a changed man. But he’s still making Swiss cheese of criminals and his muscles get a heavy workout in every other scene.
He finds an opponent in the disgustingly ’90s villain, Bali (Kiccha Sudeep), a man who stares women in the cleavage, makes loud threats of rape, and seems to expend the rest of his energy planting rose gardens over the bodies of the women who would not give in to him. It’s all ugly and unsettling in a very old-school Bollywood way. The action scenes are cut with the frantic energy of a toddler on a sugar high.
The punches land with the growl of a bulldozer, and sometimes the clink of iron rods. Dolly Bindra makes bedroom eyes for way longer than is comfortable. There’s plenty of scatological humour and melodrama too.
Overall, Dabangg 3 is a rather unsettling experience. Maybe it’s the 21-year-old heroine, the gratuitous criminality of the villain, or the police violence. It just feels like a film for a different time, one very very much not now.