“Shahrukh Khan”, the name we have been celebrating for years, is back with another anticipated film of this year, Jawan. The trailer, or the “prevue” dropped today on YouTube and reeled in around 12 million views within the span of 8 hours of its release. This proves how excited we all are for the film and how this SRK starrer may turn out to be better than “Pathaan” (2023).
Jawan is Atlee Kumar’s first collaboration with King Khan and his Bollywood debut as a director. Most of his works include Tamil films like “Theri” (2016), “Mersal” (2017), “Bigil” (2019), and more. Atlee’s directorial is a package of adrenaline-pumping action sequences and punching dialogues, which also provide a visual treat for die-hard Shahrukh fans.
The prevue opens with a remote village being attacked by men on horses, people in masks running on a railway platform (similar to people wearing clown masks in the 2019 Hollywood film “Joker”), and a woman raising her baby to the crowd in a jail (similar to Sivagami raising baby Bahubali while announcing him as the next king). All of this switches quickly while SRK’s powerful voiceover questions his existence in this world. He asks, “Who am I? A promise to my mother? Or an incomplete motive? Am I good or bad? A sin or a virtue?”Â
These questions are not only the ones SRK asks himself in the trailer, but they also provoke our own contemplation about the film and his character.
The trailer shows us various looks of Shahrukh. We see him as a soldier fighting in a war, a man wrapped completely in bandages (which may remind you of MCU’s Moonlight), SRK sitting in a room engulfed by fire, with a mask covering half his face and a few gray strands of hair, and also him wearing a mask covering half of his face. Not only this, we also have SRK’s look giving us “Pathaan” vibes as he sits in a dark room with split long hair. The best one is him wearing a red shirt, just like the old regular romantic version of himself. And the unexpected look of him unwrapping the bandage tied to his head revealing to us his bald look.
Despite the visual delight SRK and Atlee give us, we have other reasons to be excited about the film. Nayanthara makes her Bollywood debut with Jawan where we see her as a boss lady, which gives an inkling of her playing a high-ranking police officer as she steps down and walks away from a siren car. We also get a look at Vijay Sethupathi going at a punching bag and Deepika Padukone in a special appearance wearing a red saree and wrestling in mud in the rain while the crowd cheers in the background. I appreciate the way an actress is not shown as an eye-candy in a dance number, which often happens in big-budget films when well-known actresses do cameos.
Jawan is a film about a soldier who sets out to avenge personal vengeance with the help of a gang of women. But there are a lot of questions arising as the trailer provokes them with the suspicious looks of the characters. We see SRK in a bald look, wearing black glasses in a metro while dancing to “Bekarar Karke Hume” from the 1962 psychological thriller “Bees Saal Baad”, while holding people hostage in the metro with women wearing yellow jackets, packing guns. We may assume that SRK has dual roles as we see him as both a good and a bad person.
The last time we saw King Khan playing a villain was in his 1993 films “Darr” and “Baazigar”, which showcased a different side of Khan as an actor and also turned out to be career-changing films for him. Decades later, we saw him in “Raees” (2017) playing a gray character. By watching the Jawan preview, we might get the anti-hero version of SRK back after years, which the fans crave for.
Noticing the characters flipping and jumping from bombing trucks anywhere at any time, the audience might need a strong suspension of disbelief as Atlee’s physics in his films work differently from the ones we study in our textbooks.
Another highlighting point in the terrific VFX delight trailer is Anirudh Ravichander’s thundering background score, which does justice to this highly action-driven film, living up to our expectations. The 172-second-long trailer gives us enough details to know what to expect and how to expect it.
Jawan releases on 7th September, 2023. You can watch the trailer here –
