Review of Sultan (2016) by Greg C — 08 Jul 2016

I wish there were more non-depressing subtitled foreign films in my area to compete with some of Hollywood's output. I love the shared humanity that shines through cultural differences. My local Carmike brings a consistent stream of Bollywood fare, like Sultan.

This wrestling / MMA movie feels like a biopic but it is fiction. There are treatments of subjects of male ego, and feminism in it 2 hr 23 mins running time. The star, Salman Khan has got to be India's biggest and most controversial movie star, like a cross between Tom Cruise and Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

Here, he is physically impressive and pulls a deeper range of emotions and realism than I have seen from his before. Our lead female, Anushka Sharma, plays a character who is not some stock ingénue as her's is a wrestler in her own right who must spend half the movie not speaking but acting through body posture, eye movement, and facial expression.

It really is first rate. I am a little less taken with director Ali Abbas Zafffar. My first recent Bollywood film was his Gunday, which completely fried my mental movie loving circuits with its glorious beauty, headlong action, and utter inconceivable moments of awfulness.

Those stock Bollywood moments are here as well. The dances are shoe horned in. The post intermission seems stretched. There is a completely atrocious Benny Hill style sequence in the first half. But then the movie settles down and sticks to message.

It is like a Rocky 1, for Mixed Martial Arts. It almost made me cry.