"The day you follow your heart, consider yourself dead."
Hello everyone!
Well, say no more!
Tonight, we're going back to where it ALL started.
Okay, maybe not everything, but we're definitely going back to where the YRF spyverse actually began, although doing some digging it turns out that the first three movies were actually considered standalones until Pathaan came along and tied them all together.
I guess you just need SRK to make it a family party, right?
Anyway, the movie we'll be talking about tonight is a respectable age old at this point in time, going toward the 15 year marker, so it's been a bit, and honestly it occasionally shows its age in that there are plenty of the 2010s tropes in there you can recognize.
But it's also a neat action movie, so let's jump into Ek Tha Tiger!
Ek Tha Tiger, titled There Was a Tiger in English, tells the story of RAW agent Avinash Singh Rathore, who uses his alias Tiger so much that he's almost forgotten what his actual name is. We open with him hunting down an agent who tried to defect, and get out first taste of what Salman Khan's character is capable of.
This mostly means that he'll bulldoze through whatever situation he's in like a bruiser, although his sense of humour does make everything seem a little less destructive - until you take a look behind at the line he's carved through whatever he was doing!
His boss keeps trying to get him to take a vacation, his neighbours alternately either ogle him (this is mostly the women) or wonder what he does for a living (this is the male version), and Tiger usually just takes the next assignment that lands on his desk.
He does, however, occasionally cook for his boss, showcasing there IS more to him than just a brute fighter, and he and his boss chat about a chance the boss had for love but walked away from because of duty, that Tiger will lift all his money from his account when he retires and just blow it, the usual kind of male chat you know?
Then comes the next job Tiger takes, in Dublin, to trail an Indian professor the government suspects of selling state secrets to other nations, which immediately raises ALL the red flags for any sane viewer.
Because Tiger is NOT built for surveillance. This is not the type of mission he's made for, and in the real world he never would have been chosen, or if someone had been high as a kite when ordering the job done, they'd have recalled him the second they weren't stoned anymore.
What follows is about 70% of the movie in which Tiger trails after the professor's female caretaker, Zoya (Katrina Kaif, natch), who's a dancer that loves everything connected to the stars and who lost her parents young - like Tiger.
The important part to remember here is that Tiger's job is to get close to the professor, but he spends these scenes realizing all that he's missed out on, and being ridiculously clumsy trying to woo Zoya, although he does nail it with the one gift he gets her, I guess.
Then Pakistani agents pop up in Dublin, a fight ensues, and Tiger pretty much does what's his trademark, which is leaves a line of destruction behind him.
He's also late for his girl's recital, only it never happens.
Because, while he does find Zoya, he finds something else: she's a Pakistani agent, too.
And just when you think he shot her, because his boss keeps ranting that every job Tiger takes ends with someone in a body bag, these cryptic messages keep cropping up in the build-up towards a UN conference in Istanbul, using code words that only Tiger would be able to interpret.
Weaseling his way into said conference, Tiger and Zoya meet again - because, yes, it's Zoya. Tiger never did pull the trigger, and while both of them admit they love each other, they also realize their world will never allow them to be together because India and Pakistan can't stand one another and are constantly in conflict.
That's never stopped a determined man before, however, which is how, after waltzing with Zoya and putting both international groups on edge, said groups wake up in the morning to find their best agents gone and disappeared into thin air.
Tiger and Zoya pull off a disappearing act that takes them to Cuba, where she teaches dance and he paints, and things go well until a pickpocket holds Zoya at gunpoint, Tiger kills him because nobody threatens his woman and lives, and an ATM camera catches his face so that RAW knows where he is and chases after him again.
What ensues is a hilarious compilation of scenes where Tiger and Zoya outsmart their teams at every turn, until they catch Zoya, and Tiger meets up with the rest of RAW to get her out, on the pretext that she's ready to defect.
The one problem with this plan is that, once they HAVE her, he beats feet in the opposite direction with her, causing both the Indians and Pakistanis to give chase, and I swear one of the funniest scenes in the whole movie is the two opposing agencies shooting down a slope after the fleeing agents, then looking at one another and realizing: wait, we missed them by a mile, do we now start shooting EACH OTHER, or still try catching them??
I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
Tiger puts Zoya on a small plane and tells her to take off no matter what, while he guards their escape, but the only thing he earns for this is a bullet through his side from his former RAW partner, though he manages to get onto the plane, and the two fly off into the ether once more.
As a sort of finale, Tiger calls his boss to tell him that he and Zoya don't plan on ever returning - unless, that is, India and Pakistan no longer need their respective intelligence agencies to act against one another, which everyone knows will probably never happen. The movie concludes fully with supposed the couple's supposed sightings all around the world, yet no one's managed to catch them yet.
Obviously. They basically wrote the playbook, LOL.
Mildly entertaining and with a few highlights that make it worth watching, Ek Tha Tiger fails to actually deliver a truly compelling storyline, IMO. Sure, it introduces Tiger, and it's obvious what kind of agent he is from the get-go, but it spends three quarters of its runtime in Dublin with him acting out a rom-com that nobody signed up for, because you expect a spy movie.
Instead, it somehow turns into a Hallmark version of a grown man doing his best to not trip over his feet trying to get the woman; it only becomes interesting when it's revealed Zoya is an ISI agent, after which the stakes suddenly ACTUALLY feel dangerous.
I'll freely admit I skipped the "fake" romance bit. I've seen enough Hallmark movies to know how it goes; I did tune in for the aftermath, though, and THAT bit was good as hell. Khan and Kaif really deliver as action stars, and I know for a fact that Tiger Zinda Hai, the movie's sequel (which I watched right after the first one) has all the elements of a spy action movie you could ever want.
So while this is an okay movie, it's not great, and subsequent entries into the franchise are definitely better, but this one IS essential to watch so you understand where everything started.
xx
*images and video not mine
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