Dabangg 3 Movie Review: Salman, Please Take A Break

Starring Salman Khan and…does  it  matter?

Directed by Salman Khan(officially Prabhudheva)

Rating: Are  you  joking?  Okay then *(1 star)

Salman Khan is  such a huge star. He can  get his audience to watch something relevant, or at least something coherent.

Dabangg 3 is neither  relevant nor coherent. It is a film(if we may call it that) which  makes any sane  rational  humanbeing beg for  mercy. What wrong have we  done to deserve almost three hours of this tedious over-saturated bombastic  and imbecilic  torture masquerading as a movie  which brings back  the overgrown brat –cop Chulbul Pandey  with a part-prequel to the other two Dabangg  movies where  a bucolic romance unfolds between Pandey, then called Dhaakad and a pretty  lass Khushi (debutante  Saiee  Manjrekar).

 To be fair ,  this part  of  the  flashback does have its moments,  like the  time when Dhaakad/ Chulbul  meeting his  wife-to-be for the first time , sees Shah Rukh Khan’s posters in her  room and doesn’t hide his jealousy.

 To be honest, this is  the  only honest moment in Mr Salman Khan’s utterly artificial and phoney performance. Someone has got to tell him that he  must stop delivering his lines like a hungry  pizza boy delivering his order  when his  mouth is filled with portions of  the  delivery that he gobbled on the way.

The  film boasts of two writers(Dilip  Shukla, Alok  Upadhyay) . But the  writing is so slipshod it seems to have all been written on the sets. Early on there is  a ‘tender’(read:  fatuous)  moment between  Chulbul and his  ‘sexy’(read: loud) wife  Rajjo(Sonakshi Sinha  looking  like a  one-woman commercial for well-cut blouses and  colourful sarees)  where he is seen putting a nara(string)in his wife’s petticoat(with his toothbrush, if you will).

When Chulbul’s father(played by the late  Vinod Khanna’s lookalike brother) mocks him for this Chulbul retorts, “Have you  forgotten , you not only put a nara in Mom’s  petticoat you  even wore it.”

Come  again? This is the  first time Salman has resorted to  vulgarity,  and how! In a fight scene  a man grabs  another man’s testicle thinking it is a gulab jamun  in  his  pocket.

Finished laughing? Shall just throw up and give up? Or shall  we move on?

But who  will tell Salman Khan that his performances are  juvenile jokes?  Ditto  , this film,a pathetic attempt to cash in on  a successful  franchise . A classic case of killing the goose where all the  successful dialogues  from  the  earlier films  are explained… yes actually EXPLAINED. For example, while Chulbul beats up some goons in a flashback(there are so many  goon-bashing episodes that  by the time the  long lumbering film finished it seemed like  a free-for-all akhada where all the  criminals  of  the cow belt had  gathered for some stunt-porn) one goon says the line about how he will make so many holes in Chulbul’s body that he won’t know where to breathe and where to fart.

Chulbul makes  a mental note. “I will use this later,” he tells the  goon who looks like he couldn’t care less.

 Neither can we, to be honest. The  film is designed  like  a messy maidan of mayhem and mirth. In fact every action scene ends on forced  a comic note, as though to  say to  us the audience, ‘Hey you idiots, all that bloodshed that  you see is just makebelieve so  don’t get  carried away.’

We promise not to. Dabaang 3 is probably the lowest level of  misfired  entertainment attempted  by Salman in his career. And then Chulbul has the gall to  stop his mandatory  hand-to-hand combat with  the archvillain(Kannada star Sudeep , looking like Jaaved Jaffrey and  grimacing like Pran on  steroids) to lecture us on the perils of  stalking and obsessive  love.

Relevant thoughts, some  other time. Please spare us.This is  pure and unpretentious garbage.