Agra is famous for two things.

 Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya (2000) features some of Bollywood's finest supporting actors, including local favorites Johny Lever and Farida Jalal, but casts two fresh faces as the leads, Abhishek Bachchan and Kirti Reddy.  Abhishek, son of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, went on to have a long and fairly successful career, and Kirti Reddy . . . . did not.

But that's a story for another time.  In this movie, Reddy plays Pooja Sinha, an advertising executive with a dream.  Right now, Pooja works for stern but avuncular Mr. Oberoi (Kader Khan, doing his best Perry White impression), but one day she hopes to be a successful director.  She has the support of her saintly mother (Farida Jalal) and her flamboyant best pal Maggi (Johny Lever), and she's going to need it, because she's constantly late and on the verge of being fired.  Despite that, though, she manages to catch Oberoi in a particularly avuncular mood and gets permission to take three days off to attend a friend's wedding in Agra.

Agra is famous for two things; one is the Taj Mahal, and the other is Kabir . . . at least that's what Kabir (Bachchan) says.  Kabir is street smart, charming, and a talented musician, but so far he's not really successful.  When we meet him, he's filming the wedding preparations at the behest of his best friend/adoptive father Gaffoor (Paresh Rawal.)  At least, that's what he's supposed to be doing; Kabir spends most of his time filming the mysterious and beautiful lady from Mumbai.  Gaffoor is annoyed and takes over the filming, which frees Kabir up to flirt with Pooja.  She finds him interesting, but he is absolutely smitten.  Still, he never manages to say anything to her, and his grand romantic gesture as she's leaving is to ride a horse through the train station and . . . hand over a nice collection of photos from her trip as a souvenir.

Pooja returns to the office after four days and is handed termination papers; it turns out Oberoi was really serious about the three day thing.  Maggi saves the day by spinning a quick story about Pooja's engagement, showing the boss a picture of Kabir and Pooja as evidence.  Oberoi buys it, Pooja's job is safe, and everything is great.  And that's when Oberoi's son Raj (Sanjay Sure) enters the picture.

Raj is everything Pooja has been saving herself for.  He's rich, he's handsome, he's . . . that's basically it.  Rich and handsome.  (Pooja is not a deep person.)  She immediately falls head over heels for Raj, but as far as everyone at work knows, she's taken.  Maggi has another great idea - just tell Oberoi that Kabir has done something terrible, and he'll insist that she calls off the engagement.  It's foolproof, as long as Kabir doesn't show up in Mumbai, and what are the odds of that?

Meanwhile, Kabir has been brooding about Pooja, and decides to travel to Mumbai to tell her how he feels.  He's accompanied by Gaffooor and Gaffoor's wife Shyama (Himani Shivpuri), and after settling in to their temporary residence, he goes looking for Pooja and winds up saving Oberoi from a band of well-armed muggers, suffering a nasty head wound in the process.  Oberoi realizes immediately that this must be Pooja's Kabir, so he takes the lad to the hospital and then drags Pooja there to see her fiance before she can manage to lie to him.

Kabir is thrilled about the sudden engagement.  He's less thrilled when Pooja takes him aside and explains her situation.  She tells him that it's not enough for him to just break the false engagement and go away; she has to look like the innocent victim, so the only way to fix the mess she created and allow her to pursue the man she just met is for Kabir to publicly humiliate himself and play the villainous buffoon so that Oberoi will insist she end the engagement.  At this point it's clear that Pooja is actually kind of an awful person, but Kabir is a Bollywood hero in love, so he immediately commits to maximum self-sacrifice, and vows not to return home until all of her dreams have been fulfilled.

The noble self sacrifice sounds a bit extreme, but it's actually pretty typical late Nineties Bollywood stuff, and it plays out in the usual way.  Will Kabir fulfill his vow?  Of course, even if he has to become a major celebrity overnight in order to do it.  Will Pooja realize her mistake and realize that Kabir loves her, and that she truly loves him back?  Eventually!  The difference is that usually the person making the noble self sacrifice is doing it by choice, without telling the person for whom they're sacrificing themself.  Pooja asks Kabir to humiliate himself because she is too embarrassed to tell the truth, which makes her look terrible.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman choosing one man over another, and Kabir would be the first to tell you that his feelings, however powerful, do not oblige her to do anything.  He never even tells her how he feels, and she doesn't find out until her mother explains things.  That's fine, and if she had sent Kabir on his way or even asked him to publicly break off the engagement, there would be no problem.  But that's not what she does.  She asks a man she's known for four days to burn down his own reputation in order to make her look good in front of a man she's just met, in order to clean up the mess that she made.  It's really hard to sympathize with her plight.

Apart from that, Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya is fine.  There are plenty of songs.  The supporting cast is great.  the leads are suitably attractive; it's far from Bachchan's best performance, but he's suitably charming, and Reddy does her very best to bring some pathos to the character she's been asked to play.  Two people find love and everybody learns a valuable lesson, but I think the real lesson is "If your unrequited love with asks you to do something you're not comfortable with, it's okay to say no."

I can't believe it's not Dracula.

 Officially, there's no connection between The Return of the Vampire (1943) and Universal's Dracula.  Yes, both movies feature Bela Lugosi prowling about in evening dress as a sinister vampire with mesmeric powers, only to be defeated by the combined forces of science and faith, but in Return Lugosi is playing the vampire lord Armand Tesla (original character, do not steal) so that's totally different.  Unofficially?  This is as close as we get to Lugosi reprising the iconic character that he defined in a serious horror movie, and the last major studio picture to give him top billing.

The film opens in 1918 at a clinic run by Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort.)  One of her patients has contracted a mysterious aliment, and her old friend Professor Saunders (Gilbert Emery) has a shocking theory - the poor woman is the victim of a vampire!  Saunders consults a book written by an 18th century Romanian scholar named Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), and learns how to identify vampires how to destroy them, and apparently that the vampire in question is Tesla himself!  (It's really not clear how Saunders makes the connection.)

Lady Jane's patient dies, and that night Tesla instead attacks Saunders's young granddaughter Nicki (Sherlee Collier).  She's saved thanks to a quick blood transfusion, but Saunders and Ainsley have to move quickly.  They discover Tesla's lair, avoid his werewolf servant Andreas (Matt Willis) and destroy Tesla by driving a metal spike through his heart, as instructed by the guidebook written by Tesla himself.  Nicki is saved, and Andreas the werewolf is freed from his curse.  Hooray!

Years pass.  In 1942, Lady Jane is still running her successful clinic, ably assisted by Andreas, who has made a full recovery from his lycanthropy.  Nicki (now played by Nina Foch) is engaged to Lady Jane's son John (Roland Varno.)  Saunders has recently died in a plane crash, and his journal detailing the earlier vampire adventure has fallen into the hands of police detective Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), and that's where the trouble starts.  Fleet doesn't believe a word of this vampire nonsense, but the journal clearly states that Saunders and Lady Jane drove a metal spike through a man's heart, and you can't go around doing things like that even if you do belong to the aristocracy.  Fleet demands that Lady Jane show him the body, and she's happy to do so, because she's expecting the body to be intact and not decomposed, thus proving this vampire nonsense.

However, the war spoils both their plans.  The cemetery was hit by a nighttime German bombing raid, scattering corpses.  A pair of comic relief relief Air Wardens discovered Tesla's body and removed the spike so that they could bury the body again.  DraculaTesla has risen from the grave!

Meanwhile, Lady Jane has dispatched Andreas to collect respected scientist Doctor Hugo Bruckner, who recently escaped from a concentration camp.  Along the way, Andreas is confronted by Tesla.  There's a brief battle of wills, but the outcome is never in doubt; Tesla regains control over Andreas, rewerewolfs him, and dispatches him to dispose of Bruckner and bring the poor man's clothing and ID.  

At the reception that evening, Tesla takes the place of Bruckner.  Lady Jane, who has never met Bruckner and apparently hasn't seen any pictures either, cheerfully extends an open invitation for "Bruckner" to visit the clinic and her home whenever he likes.  Nicki, meanwhile, is fascinated by the stranger, who claims to have known her grandfather for a brief time, when she was a little girl.  And that evening Nicki hears a voice calling to her as the room fills with mist . . .

It sounds like paint-by-numbers vampire stuff, and it is.  The movie is trying very hard to copy the Universal horror style on a much smaller budget, and it does a good job, but the real draw here is obviously Lugosi.  And I will admit that I'm grading on a curve here; the film gave Lugosi a meaty role to sink his teeth into at a time when Universal was going out of their way not to cast him as Dracula.

Still, there are aspects of the film that I find genuinely interesting.  Tesla isn't quite Dracula; both vampires disguise their predatory nature (literally, in Tesla's case), but Tesla doesn't have Dracula's feral charm, so he supplements his mesmerism with more human manipulation.  One of his first moves is to deliver Saunders's journal to Nicki, hoping to convince the girl that she's already tainted and that he's the only one who can accept her as she is.  He's similarly manipulative with Andreas, always trying to isolate his victims and make them think that they deserve what they're getting.  Tesla lies, consistently, to everybody.

And he's countered by Lady Jane, who is absolutely the hero here.  War hero John is an obvious choice for protagonist, but he's sidelined pretty early by an apparent attack from Nicki (at least, that's what Tesla wants everyone to think, but Tesla lies) and instead it's Lady Jane who steps up.  She isn't even at the final confrontation, delayed by another German bombing raid, but she still manages to save the day with her words, and the sense of worth and belonging she's tried to instill in the people around her.  

She does get to confront Tesla earlier, though, in what is arguably the film's best scene.  Tesla boasts of his power.  He claims that Saunders died due to the vampire's curse (though Tesla lies), and threatens to enthrall both Nicki and John, transforming the youngsters into vampires as his final revenge against the woman who once dared thwart him.  Lady Jane plays the organ as he rants, and then moves the sheet music to show that she's been in control all along.  

Count Dracula looms large over the public imagination; he's one of the most recognizable characters in the world, and there have been many versions of him throughout they years, often wildly different from Lugosi's well-dressed mentalist.  But those incarnations are either drawing from or pushing against Lugosi; he's defined vampires in the same way that Margaret Hamilton has defined witches.  It's just nice to know that he had another chance to play the character onscreen without Abbott and Costello stealing top billing.

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Scrooge McDuck

Vishal Bhardwaj, writer-director of Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013), is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations, Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider, as well as the absurdist psychological horror film No Smoking and the children's films Makdee and The Blue Umbrella.  That means he's responsible for some of my favorite movies, as well as Rangoon.  It also means that he has a very distinctive and quirky style, so even an ordinary plot about star-crossed lovers can go to some strange places.

The Mandola of the title is Harry Mandola (Pankaj Kapoor), a wealthy landowner with a drinking problem.  It's not that he's a mean drunk.  Quite the reverse, really; Drunk Harry is dangerously irresponsible but also charming and deeply sympathetic to the local farmers, who are being exploited by Sober Harry, who is ruthless and only cares about his ambitions and his daughter Bijlee (Anushka Sharma).

Bijlee is a lot like your typical Bollywood heroine at the start of the movie; she's young and carefree and nothing will ever change her.  She has a lot more tattoos than the average Bollywood heroine, though, and she knows exactly what she wants.  Bijlee plans to marry her college friend Baadal (Arya Babaar).  It's a love match rather than an arranged marriage, but it still suits Sober Harry, since Baadal is the son of the spectacularly corrupt politician Chaudary Devi (art film superstar Shabana Azmi), who is Harry's partner in an upcoming land deal and also his secret girlfriend.

Drunk Harry, on the other hand, recognizes that Baadal is an idiot, and wants Bijlee to marry Matru (Imran Khan.).  Matru is officially Harry's driver, but his real job is to keep Harry out of trouble, and especially to keep Harry from drinking more than four drinks in a night.  Matru is really bad at that part of his job, but he is an effective sidekick for Drunk Harry, and he is quite good at getting Harry out of trouble, even when he leads the local farmers in a protest against himself.

That's the romantic track, but it's not the whole story.  The village of Mandola (named after Harry's family) has fallen on hard times after several years of crop failures, and all of the local farms are heavily mortgaged.  Harry wants to buy up the land and have the area declared a Special Economic Zone, which will enable him to build the factories and shopping malls of his dreams, and Chaudhary Devi wants to use the deal to further her political career, and wants Baadal to marry Bijlee in order to gain control of Harry's money.  Harry and Chaudhary Devi both get Shakespearean soliloquies to explain their motives, but Baadal does not, and has to settle for bragging about the evil plan to his very much not on board fiance..  

The villagers haven't given up, though, and they receive mysterious letters providing both hope and practical advice from someone calling himself Mao.  Mao's identity is a carefully guarded secret . . . for the characters, that is, because it's almost immediately obvious to the audience that Mao is Matru, who trained as a lawyer before becoming Harry's driver, and who spends a lot of time talking about how the land should belong to the people who work on it.

But wait, there's still more plot!  In order for the evil scheme to succeed, Harry has to stay sober.  The trouble is, if he goes for too long without a drink, he starts to hallucinate, seeing the pink buffalo from the label of his favorite brand.  It also quickly becomes apparent that the only person who can stop Sober Harry is Drunk Harry, which means that Matru is going to need a lot of pink paint.

The film has to walk a fine line with the Drunk Harry/Sober Harry dichotomy, and I think they're mostly successful.  Drunk Harry is dangerous, breaking buildings and cars and airplanes, and causing chaos wherever he goes.  he's nicer than Sober Harry, but he's not reliable.  Drunk Harry is an outlet for Harry's neglected conscience, but he's not a viable long term solution, and the movie does recognize that.

Beyond that . . . well, this is a weird movie, but it's a weird movie with tremendous style, an unassuming romantic comedy with the rhythms of a Shakespearean tragedy, a focus on the stern parent rather than the young lovers, and an invisible pink buffalo.

Spy Month: Pathaan

Pathaan (2023) is a movie with a lot to accomplish.  It needs to reboot the acting career of Shah Rukh Khan after the spectacular failure of Zero.  It needs to establish Yash Raj Films' Spy Universe as an actual cinematic universe, rather than a succession of mostly unrelated action movies that happen to involve spies.  And it needs to tell an entertaining story that stands on its own.  Making lots of money would also be nice.

Khan plays Pathaan,a farmer RAW agent with a complicated backstory.  The short version is that he was abandoned in front of a movie theater as a baby, raised in a series of government orphanages, joined RAW in order to repay his country, and was badly wounded on his first mission in Afghanistan while saving a  school full of children.  While recovering, he was basically adopted by the local Pashtun (also known as Pathan) villagers, who named him Pathaan.  (Nobody ever calls him anything but Pathaan, so there's no way to know what his name used to be.)

Pathaan is discharged because of his injuries, but he's not ready to quit just yet.  With the help of his mentor, Nandini Grewal (Dimple Kapadia), and the reluctant approval of Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana, last seen in War) Pathaan founds JOCR, the Joint Operations and Covert Research department, which provides a way for other wounded and traumatized former RAW agents to continue to serve their country.

JOCR's first mission takes them to Dubai, to foil an attempted attack on India's president by "Outfit X," a mercenary terrorist organization headed by another former RAW agent named Jim (John Abraham.)  Jim might not have a very intimidating name, but he's charismatic, driven, and very smart; Luthra says that he's as good as Kabir, just to make it absolutely clear that this movie is taking place in the same universe as War.

Jim is also not actually after the President.  It's a feint, to get RAW to pull security away from two scientists whoa re attending the same Dubai conference. Pathaan figures it out, but despite a long fight scene, he's only able to save one of them and Jim gets away with the other.  

JOCR follows the money, and the trail leads to a Pakistani doctor named Rubai Mohsin (Deepika Padukone), who lives in London but is currently in Spain.  Pathaan follows, and after a musical number in which Padukone rotates through a plethora of bikinis, he falls right into the obvious trap.  Rubai is working for Jim!  Or is she?  After Jim leaves, she saves Pathaan and reveals that she's an undercover ISI agent, there to stop Jim from obtaining something called "Raktbeej."

Raktbeej is kept in a locked vault in Moscow.  Rathaan and Rubai make a plan to steal it before Jim can get his hands on it.  They succeed, and then Pathaan falls into the other obvious trap: Rubai was working for Jim after all!  She takes Raktbeej, and Pathaan is arrested and placed on a train transporting prisoners to, presumably, Siberia.  But he escapes thanks to the timely appearance of Tiger (Salman Khan), who is, and I cannot stress this enough, alive. 

And that's just the flashbacks.  In the present Pathaan reunites with Nandini and the rest of RAW to track down Jim and prevent a devastating attack on a major Indian city.  And hey, there's Rubai, offering to help.  We can trust her this time, right?

Pathaan stars Action Shah Rukh, rather than Goofy Romantic Comedy Shah Rukh or Emotional Family Drama Shah Rukh, but Pathaan (the character) is a relatively well-adjusted guy rather than a snarling ball of violence like Don.  The movie is a decent sampler of the Shah Rukh Khan Experience; Pathaan fights like an SRK character, getting beaten up until he manages to win the fight by refusing to stay down.  His scenes with Tiger show great comic chemistry, and his scenes with Rubina show a bit of his old bumbling charm, filtered through genre and maturity.

Pathaan also firmly establishes the Spy Universe as a thing.  It's not just the Tiger cameo and Luthra referencing characters and events form the other movies, the movies share a common subtext about the need for human connection; Tiger only lives for his work until he's transformed by meeting Zoya (and vice versa), in War Naina urges Kabir to find a connection because "every soldier needs someone to come home to," and it's the loss of connection that starts Jim down his dark path, while Pathaan forges connections everywhere he goes.  Paathan and Nandini talk a lot about the Japanese tradition of  Kintsugi, repairing broken porcelain with gold to produce something new and beautiful rather than pretending that the break didn't happen.  It's a remarkable philosophy for an action hero.

Which leaves one question.  Is Pathaan an entertaining story that stands on its own?  A newcomer isn't going to know who this Kabir guy Luthra keeps mentioning is, but otherwise it stands alone.  Entertaining?  Tastes vary.  The pacing's a little wonky, with fight scenes that last a long time, and the plotting gets sloppy, but it's a masala picture.  There are songs and fights and motorcycles driving across the ice for no good reason and a jetpack dogfight.  I'm not complaining.

Spy Month: War

War (2019) isn't just a big budget spy movie with improbable gadgets and even more improbable action scenes in exotic locations, it's also an inter-generational Bollywood bromance, bringing together Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff for a long awaited dance off.  Plus all the action, I guess.

Roshan plays veteran RAW agent Kabir Dhaliwal.  Kabir has gone rogue, assassinating his handler in Delhi when he was supposed to be overseas assassinating a terrorist leader.  Kabir was a highly placed agent, and if he's switched sides, India's entire intelligence community is in danger.  He needs to be stopped, and Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) knows just the man to do it: Kabir's protege Khalid (Tiger Shroff).  

Luthra promptly gathers his team to hunt down Kabir and puts some other guy in charge, worrying that Khalid won't be able to kill his mentor.  This gives Khalid time for a flashback about his struggle to join Kabir's elite team, a struggle complicated by the fact that Khalid's father was a traitor, eventually killed by Kabir.  Still, Khalid gets his chance, and during a mission to Iraq he proves himself.  Kabir accepts him as a loyal team member, and there's the aforementioned big dance number.

Kabir's target is businessman, arms dealer and terrorist (he's a busy guy) Rizwan Ilyasi (Sanjeev Vatsa). He's finally tracked Ilyasi to Morocco, and the team moves in.  Unfortunately, one of the team (Yash Raaj Singh) is a mole, and the resulting gunfight leaves most of the team dead, and both Kabir and Khalid seriously wounded.

Back in the present, Kabir kills an Air Force Colonel in spectacular fashion, destroying two planes and a jeep in the process.  It's clear that he's working his way down a list of targets.  He still has time to pop up and taunt Khalid, supervillain style, and Khalid is desperately trying to figure out a motive.  the answers can only be found in another extended flashback about Kabir's last mission in Italy, a mission involving Ilyasi's associate Firoze Contractor (Mashmoor Amrohi) and plucky single mom Naina (Vaani Kapoor.)  

War is a spy movie, which means that things aren't always what they first appear to be.  That's true of the plot and it's also true of the movie itself, which starts with fairly grounded espionage action and ends with missiles, spy satellites, and Kabir and Khalid crashing their sports cars into a ruined cathedral that is located somewhere in the Arctic Circle for a final martial arts fight.

Despite the escalating action scenes, though, the movie is very tightly focused on the relationship between Kabir and Khalid.  There are women in the movie, and they're important; Naina's role is short but meaningful, team member Aditi (Anupriya Goenka) is the single most competent character in the Spy Universe so far, and evil plastic surgeon Mallika (Dipannita Sharma) enables some key twists, but there are no love interests to come between the guys, and when Kabir makes his glamorous entrance, it's Khalid who watches awestruck.  

And that leads to one of the movie's problems.  Hrithik Roshan has put in some terrible performances over the years (looking at you, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon) but he has evolved as an actor.  Tiger Shroff is a great dancer and a skilled action star, but Roshan has a decade and a half of experience on him.  The dance off is close, but the clash of personalities is not.

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.

Spy Month: Ek Tha Tiger

Tiger, the titular hero of Ek Tha Tiger (2012), is a spy in the James Bond mold, by which I mean that he's not very good at his job.  Everywhere he goes, people seem to know who he is, and he winds up solving most of his problems with violence.  (And, to be fair, a bit of parkour.)  he's not a straight up Bond clone, though, because Bond is suave and cynical, while Tiger is a good-hearted doofus with basically no idea of how to talk to women.  Fortunately, this is a shadowy world of espionage in which practically everyone is bad at their job.

After an action packed cold open set in Iraq, in which Tiger is forced to hunt down a former colleague at RAW who sold out his country for money, Tiger is in a reflective mood.  His boss Shenoy (Girish Karnad) offers him some time off, but Tiger doesn't really have a life outside of work, so he's eager to return to the field.  While waiting for Tiger's next assignment, Shenoy joins him for a bit of dinner and foreshadowing, with the older man opening up about the woman he loved and lost when he was younger, and the regret he feels every day about choosing duty over love.

Tiger's next assignment is to travel to Dublin and keep an eye on eccentric rocket scientist Kidwai (Roshan Seth), a man whose research forms a vital part of India's missile defense system.  Rumors have been flying about Pakistani agents getting close to the professor, so Tiger has been dispatched to observe only, with strict orders not to kill anyone.  This is not a mission that plays well to Tiger's strengths, and he has been given almost no support apart from fellow agent Gopi (Ranvir Shorey), there to watch his back.

Tiger poses as a writer, and completely fails to make friendly contact with Kidwai.  Fortunately, he does manage to make an impression on Zoya (Katrina Kaif), a dance student from London who is working part time as Kidwai's housekeeper.  Tiger needs to get closer to Zoya in order to get closer to Kidwai, but he finds himself developing feelings for her, and is somewhat hampered by the aforementioned "no idea of how to talk to women" thing.  Fortunately, she seems to like him, too.

And at this point, you've probably figured out what's going on.  Tiger hasn't, because he's bad at his job.  He continues acting like a romantic comedy protagonist, with occasional breaks to chase an ISI agent through the streets of Dublin and to prevent a tram crash.  (It was a busy day.)

Tiger learns of a break in at Kidwai's house and rushes to the scene, only to discover that Zoya has been an ISI agent all along.  He confronts her and . . . confesses his love, because Tiger is going to Tiger.  Zoya says that she was just doing her job, there's a gunshot, and we cut to Tiger back in Delhi being commended for eliminating the Pakistani agent.

But of course Zoya is fine, and it turns out she's been inserting secret messages for Tiger in ISI communications, messages which lead him to a diplomatic conference in Istanbul.  They meet, Tiger confesses his love again, Zoya admits that she loves him as well, and after some angst, they decide to run away together, donning terrible disguises and directing their respective intelligence agencies to Kazakhstan while the couple flees to Havana.

And everything is great and charming and romantic until a group of thugs try to mug the couple and they're caught on CCTV.  Suddenly they're wanted by the local police and Havana is swarming with ISI and RAW agents.  The only way out is through a series of increasingly frenetic action scenes.  Will Tiger and Zoya escape?  Well, there's a sequel, so my money's on yes.

There have been a lot of Bollywood Bond knockoffs over the years, including the inimitable Mithun Chakraborty as Gunmaster G-9, and Ek Tha Tiger follows the outlines of a Bond plot pretty closely, opening with an unrelated action sequence and then visiting three international cities in sequence to provide the backdrop for more action scenes.  However, there are some significant differences, even beyond Salman's earnest persona.  Most significantly, there's no villain.  Or perhaps the true villain is the ongoing tension between Pakistan and India.  Either way, the stake sin the movie are entirely personal, and Love Versus Duty is presented as an actual choice with consequences, rather than a foregone conclusion.  

The other big difference is Zoya.  Tiger's name is in the title, and everything through Dublin is locked to his perspective, but once Tiger and Zoya become an actual couple she steps up and becomes the co-protagonist rather than fading back into damsel in distress status.  And unlike a lot of Bond girls, at the end of the movie Zoya is very much alive, a fact which will be important later.