Tiger 3 movie review: Is Emraan Hashmi Bollywood’s new baddie?

I’ve never spent a Diwali morning as dull as today. I am not a Bhai fan. So to make the experience of watching the latest instalment of the money-minting Tiger franchise enjoyable, I took an unapologetic Salman Khan devotee to an early morning show with me. But Tiger 3 is so boring, I caught him yawning thrice, that too before the interval.

It cannot get any worse for a film of a franchise that prides itself on its ability to dish out high-octane thrill every three seconds. The movies from the YRF spy verse, whether it be War, Pathaan, or the first two Tiger films, are not known for their fantastic stories, brilliant acting performances, solid scripts, scathing social messaging, or the power to alter your perspective in some way or form. These films are pretty clear in their promise—sleek, elaborate, fun action sequences performed with jaded swag by an aging male superstar, with a svelte gun-toting heroine for arm candy and some semblance of a story to use as an excuse for all the carnage and mayhem. Tiger 3 lives up to all of it except that there is not an iota of fun to be had in its over 150-minute runtime.

Initially, the film briefly tries to pit Tiger (Salman Khan) and Zoya (Katrina Kaif) against each other but they soon unite to save their son who is forgotten all too soon, never to be seen again. The villain this time is Aatish Rehman (Emraan Hashmi), a court-marshalled ISI agent who wants to kill and succeed Pakistan’s current peace-loving prime minister and wipe India off the face of the earth. But first, he has an old beef to settle with Tiger and Zoya, from a time before they knew each other.

Trying to regain ground, Hashmi has been giving sincere performances in his second innings, whether it be in Why Cheat India (2019), Bard of Blood (2019), or Selfiee (2023). But his turn as a blown-out baddie in Tiger 3 is his most exciting yet. Of course, he is no John Abraham, but he is still the best thing about this Maneesh Sharma snooze fest. It’s an outing impressive enough to revive his itinerant career.

It doesn’t help that everyone in Tiger 3 is so busy fighting, that they hardly have the time to talk. Clearly, not a lot of time or thought was spent on dialogue. Each character fights a god awful lot more than they speak. And whenever they do, it’s garbage.

I also want to talk about Salman and Katrina’s chemistry except that there is none. Tiger 3 gives them no time to breathe. Katrina has been accorded a sizeable amount of action sequences and she does them admirably but both of them could very well have been in two different films. The distance between their performances is so immense and starkly visible, it’s like a giant glass slab that despite their kicking and shooting machine guns and blowing up bombs, neither can break.

In the epilogue, Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) calls Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) to brief him about the deadly, near-impossible new mission as if inspired by the most cringe and corny of the vendetta dramas from the 1990s. I squirmed in my seat. After churning out five near-identical, interchangeable spy movies, I thought Yash Raj Films would sit back and take stock. My bad. I’d forgotten. This is war. And YRF is in no mood to stop.

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