Salman Khan Will Roar In EK THA TIGER This Eid

J Hurtado, Contributing Writer
The last three years have been good to Bollywood action stalwart, Salman Khan.

For a long time in the middle part of the last decade, he was beginning to fade from the public's good graces following a number of terrible missteps in his personal life and disappointing performances at the box office. The man who was India's Sylvester Stallone, churning out hit after hit, had turned into India's Dolph Lundgren, once a big star, now languishing in mediocre film purgatory. That all changed in 2009 with Prabhu Deva's Wanted, a stylish, over the top action masala film that landed Salman Khan firmly back on top of the Bollywood heap.

That film, released on Eid of 2009, began a streak of hits that no one in Bollywood has been able to match. While big stars like Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan end up with hits most of the time, Salman's last three Eid releases, Wanted, Dabangg, and Bodyguard; have been box office gold, and broken collections records consistently. This year, Salman Khan teams up with director Kabir Khan (no, everyone in Bollywood is not named Khan), for Ek Tha Tiger.

Ek Tha Tiger, which translates roughly as There Once Was a Tiger, is the latest in Salman's series of testosterone driven masala entertainers to open on Eid, hoping to cement his position as the king of that holiday. Last year several films dropped out of the Eid release weekend to make way for Bodyguard, and wisely so, as the film broke all box office opening records.

Director and writer Kabir Khan is best known for his Afghanistan set drama Kabul Express and his post-9/11 take on racial profiling in America, New York. The latter wasn't very action packed, but the former was pretty well received. The trailer doesn't give us much actual footage, even though the film has been shooting for several months, however, the last few seconds certainly let us know what to expect from Salman Khan in the action department.

Hopefully the film turns out better than Bodyguard, which was cute, but was also a South Indian remake, and terribly slight. Kabir Khan seems better than that, so I have some hope. Check out the first teaser for Ek Tha Tiger
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  • mightyjoeyoung

    I didn´t undertsand much....but is he attacking Pakistan and their intelligence service...? Seems controversial....

  • Sourabh

    Being that Kabir Khan is aplogist for Islam, I am sure it is going to show that somehow there are elements in RAW along with ISI that wants to keep the conflict going. Nevermind the obvious, that Jihadi terrorism being witnessed in the world has its roots in Pakistan. I don't think this will be a controversial movie because Kabir has reputation to be soft on people of faith.

  • mightyjoeyoung

    Ok...so the director is a muslim?

    Well...parts of ISI is supposed to be very loyal to al-Qaeda.

  • Sourabh

    I will admit I have my biases regarding what is going on with religion and terrorism. I have seen Kabir Khan's "New York" and "Kabul Express". Both of those movies played the victimization of certain section of people well while white washing the roots of terrorism and the hateful ideology. Two of movies from Pakistan on the other hand were more insightful about bigotry promoted by religion - "Kudha ke Liye" and "Bol". On Indian side, the psuedo secular types can't go indepth about the phenomenon without being labeled islamo phobic. I will watch the movie but I know what I am going to expect out of an apologist. Some of the action sequences seem to be completely ripped off from Hollywood movies.

  • mightyjoeyoung

    Thanks, never heard of Kudha ke Liye & Bol....have to check those out.

    Yeah, that is the problem....how to critize religious fanatism, bigotry without becoming islam phobic.....I think Ken Loach manged pretty good in Ae Fond Kiss... (2004), Cherien Dabis in her film Amreeka (2009).

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