This was the major Hindi cinema release for Christmas 2017, one of the most expensive Indian productions and already a global hit. It’s a follow-up to the similarly successful Ek Tha Tiger from 2012. At the end of that film, ‘Tiger’, an Indian ‘super spy’ was assumed ‘missing’ after an incident in Cuba. This sequel sees the agent of RAW (India’s secret service) discovered living a settled family life in the Austrian Tyrol when his services are required to rescue 25 Indian nurses held captive by ISIL-style terrorists in Northern Iraq. What he doesn’t realise at first is that there are also 15 Pakistani nurses in the same predicament and Tiger’s Pakistani wife Zoya, also a ‘super spy’ agent, but for Pakistan’s ISI, is charged with getting them out.

Tiger Zinda Hai displays all the elements we might expect in a contemporary Indian blockbuster. Its narrative is built around its two major stars, Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, re-united from the 2012 film. These two find themselves in a typical masala film in the sense that it combines elements of the family film, the romance, action picture and war combat film. In doing so it borrows from a range of well-known films and star vehicles. Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif) are married spies just as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Mr & Mrs (US 2005) are married assassins hired to kill each other. Tiger and Zoya might indeed find themselves on opposite sides of a case (as they did in the earlier film). But they also have a young son, Junior, like the secret service parents in Spy Kids (US 2001). Once the action starts, Tiger becomes an amalgam of James Bond, Jason Bourne and Superman – while Zoya is more akin to a Michelle Yeoh or Bridget Lin in a Hong Kong action flic. Hindi cinema has always been keen on importing ideas from Hollywood and Hong Kong but I’m sure there are also homegrown Indian models I haven’t seen. I am well aware, however, that Indian cinema has had ‘action women’ since at least the 1940s.

There are several interesting aspects of the narrative. The idea of Indian and Pakistani agents fighting together against terrorists in the current climate is perhaps a fantasy, but still an intriguing prospect. It’s also novel (in the UK) to see a narrative about the continued fighting in Iraq which doesn’t take the American or European perspective. (The Americans are portrayed as not altogether trustworthy in this film.) Ironically, the film was shot mainly in the UAE which has a significant population of Indian migrant workers (a third of the local population?) mainly from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The UAE is also a market for Indian films. How many Indian migrant workers are in Iraq is less straightforward to quantify. News reports about stranded migrant workers have been numerous, but mostly in construction rather than the oil industry. The city where the nurses are held is given as ‘Ikrit’ – presumably a fictitious version of Tikrit (the birthplace of Sadam Hussein). The villain in the film is the terrorist leader played by Sajjad Delafrooz, an actor born in Iran but now living in the UAE. He’s very effective I think. I’d like to comment on the actors playing Americans but IMDb’s cast list seems to omit most of them. They seemed OK and certainly better than many of the Anglos in Indian films.

The traditional masala film in the 1970s-90s had six or seven lavish song and dance sequences. Tiger Zinda Hai still has songs but one is used for the closing credits (and is performed in a Greek island setting). Only one other song actually stops the narrative as such – a love song in the Tyrolean setting. I can’t remember much about the other four.

Since this franchise is built around its two stars, it’s necessary to think about how Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif perform. Since I haven’t see them in anything else except the first Tiger film (and in Kaif’s case as a fantasy figure in one episode in Bombay Talkies), I’m dependent on news reports and trailers for other films. Salman Khan is a big star, perhaps only just behind Aamir Khan and Sharukh Khan in the rankings. His persona is very much as the muscle man and in this film he does rip off his shirt at one point to display his physique. My impression is that he has put on more bulk since the first Tiger film. He is also said to be quite a short man (various claims are made but he’s probably about 5′ 6” – the other two major stars are not much taller). This makes Salman Khan almost square but his movements are impressive. I thought he was fine in his role and gave his fans what they want. Katrina Kaif was much more impressive than I expected her to be. Her career was dogged in the beginning by claims that she was ‘inauthentic’. She was born in Hong Kong to an English mother and British Kashmiri father and lived in various countries before settling in London where she was ‘discovered’ by a British-based Indian filmmaker when working as a model. Brought to India she continued modelling and featured in several films but was hindered by her lack of Hindi language skills. Her Tiger performances have helped to establish her properly (especially since both films have made substantial profits). I was most impressed by her athleticism – I believed that her character could perform the action moves. She is tall (certainly taller than Salman Khan) and lithe and she dances well. I will certainly consider watching her future films. As it turned out, I watched the first Tiger film, the day after watching the second. (There is a post on Ek Tha Tiger (2012) here.) I think I actually prefer the first film because it has more romance and fewer explosions. The second film is also 20+ minutes longer under a different director, Ali Abbas Zafar. He also wrote and directed Salman Khan’s 2016 blockbuster, Sultan, a genuine muscle-man flic on the basis of the trailer.