Bajrangi Bhaijaan - Salman Khan of a different hue

Mumbai, Jul 17: Bajrangi Bhaijaan, an overcooked melodrama in which an orthodox upcountry man takes on the odds of history and geography to escort a six-year-old mute Pakistani girl back to her village, is anything but a conventional Salman Khan vehicle.

The Kabir Khan-directed film sees the superstar trade his swaggering, wise-cracking persona for an infinitely more staid image.

Salman does not deliver thundering lines in the film a la Chulbul Pandey, nor does he jump into street fights with vicious villains and come out unscathed.

What's more, Bajrangi Bhaijaan does not have a single scene in which the actor goes shirtless.

He does resort to physical force once or twice when the girl in his protection is under threat, but he generally avoids violent combat. In fact, Bajrangi, despite his father's wishes, fails to make it as a wrestler because he is tickled by the touch of his opponents.

So, while the film might disappoint Salman's hardcore admirers, it might just win him some new fans.

This is a new, reinvented Salman. But is it an improved one? The jury is out.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan opens in a Pakistani village where a baby is born. Six years later, Shahida – that's the name of the girl – on a Samjhauta Express trip gets left behind on the Indian side of the border.

Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra) cannot speak, but she falls into the safest hands imaginable in thispart of the world – no-nonsense Bajrangbali bhakt Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi.

The latter takes it upon himself to restore the stranded girl, who he names Munni, back to her distraught family. Of course, that is easier than done. Pawan alias Bajrangi has to wage many wars – on his own deeply entrenched prejudices, on the air of distrust that engulfs Indo-Pak equations, and on a whole system loaded against him – before he can accomplish his risky mission.

The film's pacifist core is commendable all right, but the excesses that the screenplay takes recourse to in making its point undermine the impact of the tale to a great extent. On the way to his goal, Bajrangi finds a soulmate in Rasika (Kareena Kapoor, wasted in a half-baked role), daughter of the old Delhi man, who gives him shelter when he relocates from Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh.

In one scene, when Rasika announces to her family that Bajrangi is the man for her, her mother turns to the male protagonist and asks: what is your age? The question remains unanswered. Superstars aren't supposed to age, are they? There are several other questions that the film's plot does not answer. For one, what really is wrong with Munni? Why is the girl mute when her hearing faculties, as we discover soon enough, are in perfect order?

In a film like Bajrangi Bhaijaan, questions are probably out of place. All that you are supposed to do is go along with the flow of the narrative. If only the treatment wasn't so patchy.

But ignore the illogical leaps and the tendency to sink into farce – especially in the second half in which Bajrangi, with the help of a small-time Pakistani journalist Chand Nawab (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), faces many obstacles in the process of locating Munni's family – you might enjoy parts of Bajrangi Bhaijaan.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is Salman Khan's film all the way despite the fact that he is minus his customary bluster. But it is the angelic Harshaali Malhotra who steals the show as the mute Munni. Watch the film for her, and for what it is trying to say to a world submerged by a rising tide of jingoism.