White Guy Watches Bollywood

A random white guy engages with contemporary Indian cinema... one movie at a time

Tiger

Hindi Movie Review: Tiger 3 is bigger, more outrageous, and even more fun than its predecessors

Salman Khan reprises his role as the eponymous character in "Tiger 3," here reviewed by White Guy Watches Bollywood.

Over the span of just three films, the Tiger series has undergone the same level of metamorphosis that the Fast and Furious saga took seven entries to realize. The first movie, Ek Tha Tiger, was a relatively modest, romance-infused spy story that leaned into the relationship between leads Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif). The second installment, Tiger Zinda Hai, replaced the freewheeling, jet-setting tone of its predecessor with a much more intense, realistic, action-packed rescue narrative set in war-torn Iraq. This third film turns the knobs on both the drama and the action up to 11, delivering something much more akin to a superhero blockbuster. Salman Khan may not do as many of his own stunts here as Tom Cruise does in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but he’s definitely aiming for something every bit as spectacular.

Such a pronounced tonal shift within a single movie series can be jarring and unwelcome when the filmmakers aren’t equipped to handle it. The main reason that the Fast and Furious movies pulled off their transformation is because the more over-the-top they got, the better made they were (peaking with Furious 7). For the most part, Tiger 3 can claim success in this regard. Especially coming after the similarly-styled Pathaan, the last entry in what is being dubbed as the “YRF Spy Universe” (of which the Tiger films are also a key part), the pivot towards a more outlandish and operatic tone seems to make logical sense. But the film is also very well executed: under the steady hand of director Maneesh Sharma (2010’s Band Baaja Baaraat, 2016’s Fan), this is arguably the most polished filmmaking we’ve seen in a Tiger movie to date.

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