Director: Farhad Samji
Writers: Farhad Samji, Sparsh Khetarpal, Tasha Bhambra
Cast: Salman Khan, Pooja Hegde, Venkatesh, Jagapathi Babu
When ChatGPT renders Bollywood screenwriters jobless in the near future, they will form a union to sue artificial intelligence (AI). The high-profile case will be covered by AI-operated cameras and holograms of reporters. Elon Musk will tweet about it. In court, when a lawyer asks the writers if they remember the exact moment they realized that a machine is capable of replacing them, the answer would be unanimous: The release of Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan in 2023. That fateful April weekend is when they knew that storytelling and film-making didn’t need to be done by humans anymore. The judge will ask for audiovisual evidence. Dramatically, the footage of Salman Khan dancing, moving and speaking will appear on a screen that emerges out of thin air. And the prosecution lawyer will then summon a film critic to explain the algorithmic atrocity that is Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. The testimony would be vivid, furious and go as follows.
It’s Eid. Director Farhad Samji decides to present superstar Salman Khan’s wishes to his diehard fans in the form of a Hindi movie. He rightfully deduces that it might look more personalized than pasting the actor’s video message on the big screen. What sort of movie, you ask? Following the mega success of Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback in Pathaan, the idea is to make Salman Khan’s Pathaan: A self-reverential ode disguised as an action entertainer. The 2014 Tamil hit Veeram is recalibrated beyond recognition to achieve this. So Salman Khan stars as a fictional version of himself. He is a nameless and orphaned hero, fondly known as Bhaijaan, who has allegedly stayed a bachelor for the sake of his three younger brothers called Love, Ishq and Moh. He swears by violence. His religion, like Pathaan, is ambivalent – his brothers pray to Jesus Christ, and he recites verses from the Bhagavad Gita to impress a girl. The point is that this maybe-Muslim legend brought his brothers up single-handedly, and not unlike a defunct Narayan Shankar from Mohabbatein(2000), insists that no woman is ever allowed to tear the brothers apart. Romance is the enemy. Once the three kids fall in love (the feeling, not the brother), the six millennials decide to find mighty Bhaijaan a bride so that everyone can get married together. Enter Bhagya (Pooja Hegde), the new girl in a Delhi locality that looks like Rohit Shetty’s iteration of Khan Market. Bhaijaan finds his Jaan, and the second half features his family meeting her peace-loving family in Hyderabad. Which got me thinking: What if Raj Aryan had set up grumpy Narayan Shankar with Helen’s Miss Monica? Wouldn’t Gurukul have been cooler?
At this point, the film critic on stand in the ChatGPT trial apologizes for digressing. The judge is not pleased. The critic dismisses all rumours about the actors in the film being AI-generated. And then launches into a pained rant about how Salman Khan simply stopped trying with Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. Several examples are cited. Like when the actor’s lack of facial expressions are written into the script as a scene where Bhaijaan blames his emotional inertia on the dearth of good women in his life. Like when a song called ‘Billi Billi’ (“pussycat pussycat”) randomly begins with Khan flanked by female dancers in cat masks. Like when the choreographers pass off leg day in the gym as new dance moves. Like the many times Bhaijaan sheds tears to teach us that real men can cry, only to seem as if he were waging a war against the glycerin in his eyes. Like the time Bhagyashree of Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) fame makes a cameo as Bhaijaan Khan’s old flame (the one he left because his brothers didn’t want to move to Mumbai), as does her adult son Abhimanyu Dasani of Mard ko Dard Nahi Hota (2018) fame. A scene later, Pooja Hegde is introduced and the 25-year age difference with Khan is not acknowledged. This is normal in commercial Indian cinema of course, but what makes it jarring is the Bhagyashree cameo that implies how Bhaijaan, and Salman Khan himself, is no spring chicken. It’s a little icky, but then again, at least Bhagya seems like the sort of woman who’s watched Jab We Met (2007) too many times.
At this point, the judge and the lawyers will request the critic to take a deep breath. Have a sip of water. The harried critic will keep mumbling though, wondering aloud about how juvenile (and mildly racist) it is to have the interval slate read “Welcome to the World of South India”. Yelling about how daft the conflict in the second half is – where Telugu star Venkatesh, who plays Bhagya’s non-violent older brother, keeps scolding Bhaijaan for protecting his family from a bunch of Hyderabadi goons. Pondering about how the pre-interval action scene in the Delhi metro could have been fun, except that the dead bodies of attackers are left strewn across the compartment while Bhaijaan and Bhagya have their own little lover’s tiff. (It’s not unusual, but the sight of commuters reacting in horror to these corpses suggests that the world is real, even if the makers were too bored to factor the presence of law and order into this world). Gesturing wildly about how the other big action scene features slow-motion bullets that pierce human bodies like errant strawberry seeds, allowing them to emote and weep a lot before popping it.
The critic will break down while recalling a moment where an old lady, who wakes up from an 8-year coma, looks like she’s seen Race 4 on loop for 8 years: Shell-shocked beyond repair. The critic will have to be escorted away in agony, eventually, while muttering about why the makers thought it was meta-smart to have a whistle (as in single-screen ‘seetis’) bring a wounded Bhaijaan back to life. When the judge finally asks the ChatGPT lawyer to give a closing statement, she will be speechless at first. Then she will turn to her billionaire clients and advise them to pull the bot out of film-making. It will make ChatGPT dumber, she argues, if it continues to store motifs from movies like Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan in its memory. She will cite the creative bankruptcy of the film’s climax, where a bleeding Bhaijaan saves the day and the camera cuts to each brother declaring “game over,” “chapter close,” “knockout” and “the end” respectively. The defendants will wordlessly walk out of the court. The screenwriters will rejoice, and announce a film based on this trial called Bhaijaan LLB, starring Salman Khan. Knockout.