Chulbul Pandey (Salman Khan) is a gleefully corrupt but brutally effective police officer in rural Uttar Pradesh. Pandey sometimes refers to himself as “Robin Hood Pandey,” because he tends to steal from the criminals he encounters, although he never gets around to giving to the poor. Chulbul is devoted to his asthmatic mother Naini (Dimple Kapaidia), but is barely on speaking terms with his stepfather (Vinod Khanna) and his lazy, irresponsible younger half brother Makkhi (Arbaz Khan).
Both brothers are having romantic trouble. Makkhi is in love with Nirmala (Mahie Gill), the daughter of the local schoolmaster (Tinnu Anand). He wants to marry her, and spends a lot of time making angry speeches to the schoolmaster, but the fact is that his own father is the one refusing the match; the factory has debts, and the only way to pay everything off is if Makkhi can bring in a sizable dowry, and there’s no way that a schoolteacher can afford that.
Chulbul, meanwhile, catches sight of Rajo (Sonakshi Sinha) while chasing a suspect, and is immediately smitten. Strangely, she doesn’t seem interested, even after he follows her around, stares at her, and has her alcoholic father (Mahesh Manjrekar) arrested on false charges. It’s a mystery.
Chulbul’s last big haul was from a crew of semi-competent bank robbers who were, it turns out, working as “fundraisers” for Cheddi Singh (Sonu Sood, the ghost from Arundhati), who is the student organizer for corrupt but reasonably nice and strangely cuddly politician Dayal Babu (Anupam Kher). Cheddi offers to let Chulbul keep the money if he’ll come and work for the party, but Chulbul decides instead to keep the money and continue working for himself. Cheddi is not happy.
Makkhi has finally thought of a solution to his dowry dilemma. He decides to steal the money from Chulbul’s safe, then give it to the schoolmaster, who can give it to Pandey senior. Then when everything has calmed down, he can steal the money back from his father and put it back in the safe. Unfortunately, Naini catches him in the act, and she’s so horrified by the prospect of her son being a thief (despite the fact that Chulbul stole the money in the first place) that she has a massive asthma attack, and Chulbul later returns home to find her dead.
For his mother’s sake, Chulbul tries to make peace with his brother and stepfather, but it’s too late; they want nothing more to do with him, so he quietly leaves the house. The relationship deteriorates further after Makkhi beats a worker at the factory, and further still after Chulbul crashes his brother’s wedding and upstages the groom in spectacular fashion. That is genuinely unfortunate, because Cheddi has a plan for revenge, and it involves Makkhi working for him.
Dabangg is a smorgasbord of action movie manliness; the opening fight scene lifts bits from The Transporter, Romeo Must Die, and The Matrix, and later scenes
And then there’s Chulbul himself. Chulbul isn’t exactly a hero, but he’s not a villain, either. He’s a force of nature, a swaggering slab of macho, and the reason why he’s so thrown by his fixation on Rajo and the sudden collapse of his dysfunctional family is that he’s never faced a problem he couldn’t solve by punching somebody, shooting somebody, or threatening to punch and shoot somebody before, and now he has two. It’s a fantastic part for Salman Khan, and he plays it well.
(As an aside, I was pleased to see that the filmmakers made no effort to disguise just how short Salman Khan is; it’s even a minor plot point, since in the final fight his opponent has a definite reach advantage. It’s a good choice, since Chulbul being a little short only adds to his swaggering bravado.)
As hypermasculine as the film is, though, in the end it’s all about Mom. Every plot point comes back to two little boys desperately competing for their mother’s attention and approval. Being a man in Bollywood is all about family, and family starts with Mom.
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