TUBELIGHT (U)
Director: Kabir Khan
Cast: Salman Khan, Sohail Khan, Zhu Zhu, Matin Rey Tangu, Om Puri, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Shah Rukh Khan
Running time: 136 minutes

It’s that Friday of the year. An Id release for Bhai is as big a movie carnival as it gets. But Tubelight, unfortunately, is no biryani, rather a low-fat too-green salad that is bound to turn away people hungry and disappointed. Director Kabir Khan, who managed to blend in some much-needed sense and sensibility into a Salman Khan film quite beautifully with Bajrangi Bhaijaan, oversteps his boundary line trying to reprise the Rajkumar Hirani school of therapeutic cinema but with all the wrong ingredients imaginable.

Officially adapting Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy — and borrowing also from the French film A Very Long Engagement — the eight-year-old “little boy” there is Kabir’s “Tubelight” here. Laxman Singh Bisht (Salman) is a dimwit, who has always been at the receiving end of all “slow” jokes in the small town of Jagatpur in Kumaon. It’s his younger brother Bharat (Sohail Khan) who’s got his back and the two are quite inseparable. But it’s 1962 and the Indo-China war is waiting in the wings, forcing Bharat to sign up for the army, leaving Laxman with the know-it-all Banne Chacha (Om Puri) and his books on Gandhian philosophy.

If you have snoozed away already, time to wake up to Shah Rukh Khan in silhouette. He is the magician in town who first sows the seed of the film’s big idea — if you have faith, you can achieve anything. Laxman takes this dictum to heart and Banne Chacha links this to Gandhi’s principles and the man goes around town trying to earn more faith, echoing Aamir’s wandering ways of self-realisation in PK.

The Chinese mother-son duo of Liling and Gua (Zhu Zhu and Matin Rey Tangu), who at the onset of the war come from Calcutta to Jagatpur of all places in this country, are the device to show Laxman’s golden-hearted antics. There are a couple of genuinely funny scenes between Laxman and “Goo”, as he calls the kid, but things get sappy soon again as all kinds of bad news trickles in from the battlefront. And now our man has to use his only superpower — faith!

Tubelight plays for all of its running time on one single note — that of over-sentimentality. Hugs and tears, more hugs and more tears, slow motion and songs for even more hugs and tears till you tear up the screen or hug the exit door. In fact the second half has songs springing up every few minutes to convey every emotion that has already been conveyed many times before. The original film Little Boy was, in fact, taken apart by critics for its excessive melodrama and so you can imagine what a Bollywood tadka on top of that can do to a film. 

Obviously Kabir had a lot of “faith” in Salman to pull it all off. But Laxman is no Bajrangi. This is a difficult portrayal of a man who is not mentally challenged and yet not very bright. Salman is good in a few scenes but largely out of depth, leading to unintentional reactions. He also looks way too big and heavy for the aam aadmi card he is trying to play in the film. For fans hoping to catch their Bhai in action, he hardly takes off his sweater and has only two slaps to deliver in the entire film. Shah Rukh got more cheers from the first day-first show crowd for his one-scene special appearance!

Of the rest of the cast, the kid Matin is good and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub is, as usual, excellent. The Chinese actress Zhu Zhu with a dubbed voice mouthing her Hindi lines reminds you of all the dubbed foreign films you see on TV and it’s quite a trying experience. Tubelight is also the last big Bollywood release for Om Puri and he is his vintage self. The best thing about Sohail Khan is that his character is sent off to war and hence away from the camera early enough.

Stars have been getting trapped in their images ever since the first star was born. Salman Khan, perhaps one of the biggest motion picture stars of all time of all cinema, has never really faced such a roadblock because directors have always designed films around his stardom and never around his acting chops. Kabir Khan tries to change that connection but this Tubelight has turned out to be all flicker and no light.

 Pratim D. Gupta
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