Shah Rukh Khan has always understood something about spectacle that most Hindi film actors have not: that it is not enough to be in a big film. You have to be as big as the film. Jawan is a very big film — Atlee Kumar operates at a scale that makes most Bollywood productions look provisional — and Shah Rukh Khan is bigger than it. Twice over, in fact, since he plays two roles and makes both of them feel inhabited.
Atlee is a Tamil filmmaker working in Hindi for the first time, and his cinema is unabashedly maximalist. The action sequences here are not designed for realism. They are designed for the kind of collective joy that a packed auditorium can generate when everyone in it has agreed to surrender to the spectacle. Jawan earns that surrender. The sequences are inventive, kinetic, and staged with a spatial confidence that Hollywood blockbusters often lack.
Vijay Sethupathi, playing the villain, is having more fun than anyone on screen is allowed to have. He is physical, menacing, and watchable in the way that great screen villains are watchable — you wait for his scenes. Nayanthara is underused, which is a waste, but she commands every moment she is given.
The film's politics are blunt. Healthcare. Farmer debt. Systemic corruption. Atlee deploys them like grenades — loud, momentarily blinding, designed to leave a mark. Whether they constitute a political statement or political decoration is a conversation worth having. But the film does not leave you indifferent. That, in 2023, is itself something.
SRK is back. Fully, unreservedly, magnificently back.