Sultan – The Fight

18

It’s the time of the year, when going for a Salman Khan movie is the order of the day. Last year this time it was Bajrangi Bhaijaan and now it is Sultan.

Sultan is a story of a wrestler, Sultan Ali Khan played by Salman Khan. Sultan is a heedless carefree village boy with not much aim or ambition in life.

Until he meets a girl, Aarfa (Anushka Sharma), dedicated, sincere, focused and with the dream of winning a gold medal at the Olympics in Wrestling for India, a dream she shares with her father, who also is a wrestling coach. Sultan falls in love with Aarfa but she, a girl studied and brought up in Delhi is clear that these emotions will digress her from her dream and there is no place for love in her life. But she agrees to be friends with Sultan. Sultan joins her father’s academy to increase proximity with Aarfa. Her uninhibited and unbridled ways make the local boy believe she too is in love with him. And then one day in the presence of all his friends, Aarfa humiliates Sultan for even thinking that she could be in love with him, she just thinks of him as a local wisecrack with not much depth and does not command any respect. That incident spurs Sultan to take up wrestling seriously and he puts in everything he has to make himself worthy of Aarfa and gain enough respect and ends up being a champion wrestler. Aarfa agrees to marry him and makes Sultan a national level, common wealth and a world champion and eventually an Olympic gold medalist.

But wait that’s just half the story.

With fame comes a lot of arrogance. Sultan starts to believe himself to be invincible. And he believes he deserves the arrogance as it is so hard earned. In some turn of events he loses his family and is separated from his wife. Some reasons attributed to him, some just circumstantial. The love birds are separated and he is pining for forgiveness and to be with his love.

He has stopped wrestling and given up on life, almost. He lives a mundane lack luster life. He eventually gets an opportunity to be part of a Pro tournament, which he sees as a last chance to redeem himself and make some money for his cause. Does he go ahead and fight, does he win, Does he gets his love back. Its worth a watch.

The movie is about fighting your own demons. If you conquer yourself the outside fight will be won. And as a wrestler, as a fighter (inside and outside the ring) you’ve not lost till you’ve given up. No matter how many times life beats you, you still have the option of getting back, if you decide to fight. And he is just not fighting to prove himself, but for his coach, his sponsors and his franchisees who too are losers in a way but are learning to fight from Sultan. And he wants to win for all of them.

The production of the movie is splendid; after all it’s a Yash Raj movie. The camera work and cinematography is beautiful. The fight scenes are shot very well. Wide camera angles and large canvas makes the movie enormous.

Salman Khan in the movie is brilliant. He was great in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, here he is outstanding. Yes the role is physically very demanding, but Salman has done it  well. He emotes well and fights with gusto. Anushka has a smaller role, as expected and has done well too. But the age gap between the two is obvious. May be Kangana in the role would have been good too. The Haryanavi accent of the leads is quite adorable. Randeep in a small but significant role has done well too. Amit Sadh is very impressive, wish to see him more often.

Music is good, the background score is very very inspired from GoT.

Ali Abbas Zaffar has done a great job with the story and direction.

The movie tries too hard to drive the point – don’t give up just keep fighting. Some places a little preachy. The second half of the movie is a little slow, could have been tighter.

Watch it and enjoy yourselves. And Eid Mubarak to you all….!!!