The fourth film in the YRF Spy Universe, the Shah Rukh Khan star vehicle Pathaan is beautiful, alluring, and full of excellent high-octane action sequences performed by beautiful people and supplemented with stupendous special effects. It’s Bollywood’s best answer to Mission Impossible. But it is also a menacing and even sinister film. 

The problem isn’t that the film is inspired by disagreeable or even offensive politics, though these are accusations that probably could hold up in any reasonable court of law. The problem is the film’s protagonist is so thoroughly de-personified that he’s little more than an unforgiving, blank slate for jingoism, incapable of being a normal human. Pathaan imagines a world in which the still-brainwashed Bucky, rather than Steve Rogers, were the true Captain America—or, Captain India.

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