Spy Month: Tiger Zinda Hai

 As the title of Tiger Zinda Hai (2017) says, Tiger is alive.  Which is not really a surprise; both Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif), the Pakistani agent he fell in love with, were perfectly fine at the end of Ek Tha Tiger.  However, it turns out that Tiger's mentor and former boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) reported him dead at the end of the disastrous confrontation in Havana, purely so that other characters could be surprised when he tells them that Tiger is alive.

And Shenoy needs Tiger.  In Iraq, notorious terrorist leader Abu Usman (Sajjad Delafrooz) was wounded ina clash with the Iraqi military.  He was brought to the local hospital, which his men promptly took over, taking twenty five Indian nurses and fifteen Pakistani nurses hostage.  The Americans see this as an opportunity, and are preparing to flatten the hospital with an airstrike.  Shenoy convinces them to give him a week to rescue the Indian hostages, but there's only one man who could succeed at such a mission, and that's Tiger.  Who is, as previously mentioned, alive.

Tiger and Zoya are currently living in the Austrian Alps with their young son Junior (Sartaaj Kakkar.)  Since they are still movie spies, they each get an action scene to reintroduce themselves to the audience: Tiger saves Junior from a pack of unrealistically aggressive wolves, a task which involves a great deal of snowboarding, while Zoya beats up a gang of thugs trying to rob a convenience store, and she does it without being seen by the security camera, because Zoya remembers how they got caught in Havana.

Shenoy arrives and makes his pitch.  Zoya tells Tiger that he should go, because Tiger has always loved his duty even more than he loves her, which is not the way I remember Ek Tha Tiger, but whatever.  Tiger agrees, and travels to Iraq to assemble his rag-tag team of highly skilled RAW agents.

Tiger has a plan.  It's a terrible plan, because Tiger is much better at fighting people than he is at the other aspects of spycraft, but it is a plan.  And things go fairly well at first.  Tiger and his men manage to get jobs at the oil refinery run by expatriate Indian Firdaus (Paresh Rawal), who isn't exactly a terrorist sympathizer but he'll gladly suck up to anyone with power.  All they have to do is stage an industrial accident and they can be sent to the terrorist-occupied hospital.

And then, while meeting a contact in town, Tiger spots Hassan (Jineet Rath), a kid who's been forcibly recruited as a suicide bomber by Abu Usman.  Of course Tiger is going to rescue the kid, but his rescue leads to a running gunfight through town and the death of Tiger's contact.  But just when it looks like Tiger and Hassan are going to die as well, they are rescued by Zoya, who has been recruited by the ISI to rescue the captive Pakistani nurses.  Tiger seizes the opportunity and proposes that RAW and the ISI join forces to rescue all the hostages.

While the main characters are the same in both Tiger movies, there are some noticeable differences between them.  The obvious difference is that Tiger Zinda Hai has an actual villain; Abu Usman may not have a cat or a secret lair, but he is charming, he articulates his motivations clearly and forcefully, and he is a very bad man nonetheless.  

On the other hand, Tiger Zinda Hai is as much a war movie as it is a spy movie.  That means that it leans on some war movie plots, like the member of Tiger's team who brings an Indian flag along so that he can fly it at the end of the mission, but it also means that the movie goes to some dark places, particularly with the treatment of women in the warzone; Zoya does dish out some righteous vengeance to those responsible, but it's still a hell of a tonal shift.

And then there's the question of love versus duty.  When the topic comes up in dialogue, Zoya and the other characters all decide that duty is more important than love after all, though it's worth noting that when put to the test, Tiger and Zoya choose love very single time.