Bodyguard (U/A)

Director: Siddique

Cast: Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Raj Babbar, Rajat Rawail, Asrani, Mahesh Manjrekar

Running time: 135 minutes

With great power comes great responsibility. So said Uncle Ben to Peter Parker. And those wise words are not only applicable to Spiderman and Superman, but also to Salman.

Here’s a man, to put in his own words, who has a connect with the audience like none other. It’s really like Salman’s got his own web-shooters on his wrists and he’s caught the Bolly-crazy nation in his web. As he told t2 after Wanted and before Dabangg: “There’s something I have which they [his rivals] can never have. There’s a connect, I don’t know what the connect is.”

But why try and exploit it like this? Getting your family members to produce inane remakes of south Indian hits and making pots and pots of first weekend money is misusing your power, isn’t it?

As in what is Bodyguard? What exactly is it? Does it even qualify as a movie? No, this is not a random rant from a Godard-guzzling- Scorsese-spewing-festival-hopping snoot, ready(!) to trash anything which is big and starry in Bollywood. Even as a wide-eyed member of the mango people (aam junta, for the uninitiated), this is really stretching it too far.

Just chew on the plot. Salman is Lovely Singh, a professional bodyguard who is hired — by a modernday zamindar (Raj Babbar) who saved his mother and helped him be born — to protect Divya (Kareena Kapoor), whose life is supposedly in perennial threat.

In an effort to get him off her back, Divya starts calling Lovely from a private number with a voice that is not hers (it’s her elder sister, in fact)! Logic? If he falls in love, he will stop shadowing her!

Lovely, the celebrity bodyguard whom Katrina Kaif hugs every time he saves Bollywood’s heroine number one from some fanatical fan, falls in love with this voice — Chhaya! And yes, Divya falls in love with him, too. But the father mustn’t know and so Chhaya remains in the chhaya.

Yes, Salman Khan the superhero, whose shirt buttons are opened by water sprays and whose biceps bounce to beats and whose action setpieces are more spectacular than Rajini jokes, has no clue which girl he loves through an entire film! It’s incredible that the bodyguard associations — are there any? — haven’t yet sued the makers for showing their best screen rep to be this dumb.

Also, haven’t we already had Jhootha Hi Sahi earlier in the year? Haven’t we used and abused Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’s storytelling device a dozen times in this last decade? Hadn’t we stopped making these role-playing idiot plots, where the confusion can be cleared if only the two guys just landed up in a room?

Bodyguard is so archaic and absurd that you actually wait for the music videos which pop up every second reel. No, there are no songs — except the Pritam-composed I love you (the rest is Himesh Reshammiya), which is really the high point of this tedious theatre exercise — only item numbers meant to suck you back in.

Ironically, in the middle of all the mindless mayhem, Salman himself is very good. No matter how preposterous the plot and contrived the character, he commits himself fully. He, of course, plays Chitti (Endhiran’s Rajini robot), for a large part of the film but when he is required to emote, he can bring a lump to your throat quite effortlessly. Like he does in the park scene, when Kareena asks him to propose to her thinking she is Chhaya.

That makes it all the more baffling why Salman would choose to do films like Ready and Bodyguard. There can be chartbusters, dhasoo lines and jawdropping stunts even in a film that makes a wee bit of sense. More Dabanggs can surely be written, right?

Because the problems with adapting a south Indian hit to a Bolly scenario are endless. Comedians still have their own space in Malayalam and Tamil films but when Rajat Rawail tries to reprise the same here as Tsunami Singh, it falls flat. And that’s like one-third of Bodyguard.

How’s Kareena? Her radiant presence gives the film a much-needed fillip but when you play a character whose voice changes every time you make a phone call, how much can you do? Really!

This is the long Id weekend and in these five days, Bodyguard’s sure to topple a few box-office records. But are we really getting da-bangg for our bucks? Or are we just being fed hastily-put-together money-making designer projects with Salman as the bait?

To sign off Spidey style, Salman’s stardom is his gift and his curse. He knows he doesn’t need to do anything but does that mean he shouldn’t do anything?